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  • Zealot

  • The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
  • By: Reza Aslan
  • Narrated by: Reza Aslan
  • Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
  • 4.5 out of 5 stars (339 ratings)
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Zealot

By: Reza Aslan
Narrated by: Reza Aslan
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Summary

From the internationally bestselling author of No god but God comes a fascinating, provocative, and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the "Kingdom of God." The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first-century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs wandered through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This was the age of zealotry - a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction; a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret; and ultimately the seditious "King of the Jews" whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot yields a fresh perspective on one of the greatest stories ever told even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of Jesus of Nazareth's life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.

©2013 Reza Aslan (P)2013 Random House

Critic reviews

"In Zealot, Reza Aslan doesn't just synthesize research and reimagine a lost world, though he does those things very well. He does for religious history what Bertolt Brecht did for playwriting. Aslan rips Jesus out of all the contexts we thought he belonged in and holds him forth as someone entirely new. This is Jesus as a passionate Jew, a violent revolutionary, a fanatical ideologue, an odd and scary and extraordinarily interesting man." (Judith Shulevitz, author of The Sabbath World)
"A bold, powerfully argued revisioning of the most consequential life ever lived." (Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief)
"The story of Jesus of Nazareth is arguably the most influential narrative in human history. Here Reza Aslan writes vividly and insightfully about the life and meaning of the figure who has come to be seen by billions as the Christ of faith. This is a special and revealing work, one that believer and skeptic alike will find surprising, engaging, and original." (Jon Meacham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power)

What listeners say about Zealot

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
  • M
  • 16-10-13

Holy Moly!

So, who does this Jesus fella think he is? I’d never bought the whole middle-class, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road pacifist guru-magician image that was thrust down our throats at school; I couldn’t quite see how that ancient Jewish peacenik could’ve inspired billions of people across thousands of years and cultures to such heights of beauty and horror. But, the Jesus portrayed in this book is one I like! A complex and charismatic Angry Young Man filled to the brim-stone with revolutionary zeal, with a talent for whipping up a crowd with his rhetoric and sleight-of-hand - this is someone worth reading about. Picture Jesus as a Jewish Nationalist Socialist (oh, the irony …) taking on The Roman Man with his mob of illiterate, fundamentalist peasants - it’s quite an image. And then throw him into the wonderfully described world of spirits, magic, gods, and the starkly brutal and bloody politics of Imperial Rome, and you’ve got one helluva story! That that Jesus was swept aside for early Christian PR reasons is a tragedy we may never recover from ...I like and respect Jesus of Nazareth much more than Jesus the Christ, and the Son of Man has a lot more to offer us than the Son of God does. An excellent and thought-provoking book - Amen!

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10 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    3 out of 5 stars

Speculative but sometimes interesting

Would you listen to Zealot again? Why?

No, because I got all I needed from one listen

What about Reza Aslan’s performance did you like?

Well read, and it's always nice to hear the author read their own work.

Any additional comments?

The best part of the book is the first bit, setting out the cultural milleau in Roman Palestine. As for JC himself, Aslan is convinced that his take is sensational and new; but it's not the ground-shaker he thinks it is. The specifics where he diverges from other attempts to historicise Jesus are in Aslan's attempting to locate him in the Zealot tradition (rather than an apocalyptic as he's usually seen). But his evidence for this largely relies upon his own exegesis of biblical passages. In one particularly excruciating section he goes into details of the exact etymology of the Greek verb in “render/give/return unto Caesar...” in order to show what Jesus really meant by it; in the process apparently rather forgetting his own previous emphasis that JC would have spoken little if any of this language, and the word in the NT is not that that he would have uttered himself.

Similarly, he shows how the trial before the Sanhedrin as recorded in Mark contradicts the rabbinical procedures for such trials. He then admits that the trial took place in the second temple period, before the emergence of the Rabbinic/Mishnaic tradition, but quickly points out that Mark *was* written within the Rabbinic tradition. A bizarre position: that the author of Mark ought to have rewritten his oral sources to make them conform to the standards of his day, and that because he did not this is evidence that the events could not have occurred as the traditions described them.

These are both typical of its approach: it presents itself as falling within the scholarly rather than christological tradition, yet ultimately relies upon exegesis and substantial interpretative assumptions rather than painstaking and careful critical comparison.

Not a bad or deliberately dishonest book, but he has a prior agenda (JC the militant anti-Roman), and cherry-picks and interprets the sources to back it up.

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9 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Kind of missed the point.

If this book wasn’t for you, who do you think might enjoy it more?

People who are sure that the Church is full of conspiracies and into sensationalism in some way.

Would you ever listen to anything by Reza Aslan again?

Probably not.

Which scene did you most enjoy?

Enjoy would be the wrong word. It was amusing to recognise where his conclusions were based upon misunderstanding and lack of proper scholarship

You didn’t love this book--but did it have any redeeming qualities?

I'm not really sure that it does. How often does the average man believe in the written word, just because it is written and the author lays claim to authority that he doesn't possess or more dangerously, misleads the facts about his authority. (Check out the realities of his degrees as they would apply to being a biblical scholar, especially if you've ever seen someone misrepresent a resume for a job they weren't really qualified for but needed.)

Any additional comments?

In today's world of the Internet, self publishing, and lack of academic critical review before getting published, it has been my experience that we must spend as much time researching the credentials of the scholar who publishes, as we do in researching sensational assertions. There is a danger as an author of settling on a hypothesis and then focusing on proving that hypothesis rather than collecting information objectively and completely and then seeing what hypothesis that information might suggest.
This author appears to have fallen into these traps and so based upon the other scholars I have read, along with my personal research over a 5 year period, I'm not sure there is much value in this work any more than the works that Dan Brown used for the themes of the Da Vinci Code.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Informative,but more questions than answers.

I have surprisingly enjoyed this audio book. I have long been interested in the real truth and the fiction hidden within the Bible. Reza Aslan narrates his book with enthusiasm. I must admit that I wouldn't make it to the end of the written book, but the audio version is more bearable. I didn't fully understand all of the threads which he references throughout, but I picked up the general gist. It is a revealing book but you have to have an interest in the subject to make sense of it. It's not a book for someone unfamiliar with the Bible in my opinion. It has made me ask more questions than finding answers.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

Excellent Glimpse into the world of Jesus

Where does Zealot rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Being a big fan of Reza Aslan and his work (particularly his talks, which I watch often), his narration of this book worked for me really well. Reza Aslan has done a great deal to make learning more about world religions, and in this case Jesus 'the man' both incredibly interesting and accessible, whilst also upholding robust scholarly study, backing up his claims with a plethora of sources.

It is Aslan's story-telling style that really elevates this audiobook from being an interesting historical study into an exciting and deeply thought provoking story that really made me think about the historical context in which Jesus lived in a new light.

What did you like best about this story?

Reza Aslan's reading of this book really brought the story to life.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Very thought provoking and interesting.

Brings to life a fascinating time and place in history. One of the best audio books I've read.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    5 out of 5 stars

Great

Brilliant, as near to the truth as I think you will get. Totally plausible and well researched story, read by the author himself.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

Poor

Very poor. Story is no great review of the historical Jesus - relies heavily on the canonical gospels - written years after ‘events’ are claimed to have taken place.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Amazing

Deeply fascinating and insightful, I will look forward to listening many more times to this audiobook. Reza Aslan is a great writer

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Excellent audio and subject

Best audio book on the subject I’ve listened to in ages, learnt a lot about the historical context of early Christianity 👏

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