Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan

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Zealot might be disturbing for Christian readers. Its author was born into a Muslim family in Iran. After his family emigrated to the United States, he became a Christian for a while. After closely studying the origins of Christianity, however, he became “a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than [he] ever was of Jesus Christ”.

As Aslan tells the story, Jesus was born in the humble village of Nazareth, not in a manger in Bethlehem (despite what the Bible says, the Romans never conducted a census that forced everyone to stop work and travel to their birthplace). Jesus was illiterate, worked as a laborer and was probably married (almost all young Jewish men got married in those days). When he was roughly 34 years old, he left Nazareth and began preaching a politically-charged message to his fellow Jews.

At the time, there were lots of angry but hopeful Jews in Palestine. They were anticipating the arrival of a messiah, someone who would establish the Kingdom of God on earth and get rid of the Romans. Some claimed to be the messiah. Others were thought to be the messiah by their followers. Some, including Jesus, were said to have performed exorcisms or miracles. What the various preachers, dissidents, rabble rousers and zealots had in common was their nationalistic desire to kick the Romans out of Palestine and restore Israel to its former glory. 

None of these supposed messiahs claimed to be divine, however. The Jews, of course, were strictly monotheistic. It was enough that the messiah do God’s work by overthrowing the Roman oppressors. Many also hoped for economic reforms, like lower taxes. Jesus, in particular, apparently had a very low opinion of the wealthy priests and merchants who cooperated with the Romans.

Crucifixion was a common punishment for Rome’s enemies, so it was no surprise that Jesus was found guilty of sedition after a few years and executed. Being crucified, however, showed that Jesus wasn’t the messiah after all. The Romans were clearly still in power. Jesus had failed to institute the Kingdom of God. Aslan suggests that some of Jesus’s followers wanted to explain away his apparent failure. They spread the idea that Jesus rose from the dead and would one day return to finish his work. That’s when the Romans would finally be overthrown.

We know that the various books of the New Testament were written decades after Jesus’s crucifixion. We also know that almost all of it was written by men who never met Jesus, never heard him speak and never saw him perform any miracles. Aslan points out lots of inconsistencies and omissions in the New Testament and plausibly argues that many stories told about Jesus were designed to satisfy political and theological agendas. For example, claiming that Jesus was born in Bethlehem was a way to make his birthplace consistent with earlier prophecies about the messiah.

What I found especially interesting in Zealot was Aslan’s discussion of the apostle Paul, who wasn’t one of the original twelve apostles. He was a Jew and a Roman citizen who is said to have encountered an otherworldly Jesus on the road to Damascus a few years after Jesus’s crucifixion.

Whether or not Paul had a vision while traveling to Damascus, he doesn’t seem to have written anything saying that he did (the road to Damascus story is now attributed to Luke, who was apparently one of Paul’s disciples). But, according to Aslan, Paul was mainly responsible for the birth of Christianity as a religion separate from Judaism.

Jesus, of course, was hardly a Christian himself. For example, Aslan says there is no evidence that Jesus ever referred to himself as the “Son of God”. That was a title reserved for the past kings of Israel, like David. It was Paul who promoted the story that Jesus was divine and began referring to Jesus as “Jesus Christ”. Paul also founded churches in other parts of the Roman empire. In fact, more than half of the New Testament was either written by Paul or is about Paul.

Paul’s distinctive views were rejected by the other apostles (the ones who had known Jesus and were still alive), including James the Just, the younger brother of Jesus and the leading figure among the apostles after Jesus’s death. Since Paul couldn’t convince the other Jews that Jesus was divine, he concentrated on convincing the gentiles, some of whom were receptive to his relatively monotheistic message.

Of course, the historical record is extremely spotty with regard to Jesus. Some scholars no doubt disagree with Aslan’s interpretation of the evidence. A Christian, being convinced that Jesus was a unique individual who actually did perform miracles, actually was resurrected and actually was (and is) God’s son, might say it’s pointless to try to understand Jesus from an historical perspective.

In addition, Aslan never really explains why he holds Jesus of Nazareth in such high regard (even if Jesus was anti-Rome and a champion of the poor). Aslan doesn’t even emphasize Jesus’s role as a moral teacher, arguing that the idea of turning the other cheek, for example, didn’t apply to people in general – it only applied to one’s Jewish enemies (and certainly not to Romans, for whom the sword was more appropriate). But I found Aslan’s account extremely interesting and very plausible. Here is part of his concluding summary:

Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem [by the Romans in 70 C.E.] was almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology. And that is precisely what Paul provided. The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and require nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus’s followers…

Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has utterly subsumed the Jesus of history. The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history.

Money: a Better Explanation for the NJ Bridge Scandal

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The biggest mystery about the Fort Lee, New Jersey, bridge scandal isn’t whether our governor, who is well-known as a loudmouthed, hotheaded bully, was behind the whole thing. The biggest mystery is why Christie or his inner circle would bother messing with Fort Lee at all. Why was it “time for some traffic in Fort Lee”? Because the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee (population 35,000, the 23rd largest city in the state) didn’t endorse Christie’s reelection? It doesn’t make any sense.

No, a much better explanation is offered by Steve Kornacki, a journalist who knows New Jersey politics. He suggests that the reason for creating that massive days-long traffic jam may have been to interfere with a billion-dollar real estate development that just happens to sit at the Fort Lee entrance to the George Washington Bridge.

As Kornacki explains, the development is premised on excellent access to the bridge and New York City. With one access lane instead of three, the location would be significantly less valuable. If the closure lasted any length of time, the deal might have collapsed. If the deal collapsed, the lanes could then be reopened, allowing some other real estate developer to jump in.

Or maybe it was merely a way to extort some campaign contributions from the kind of people politicians love – in this case, rich people who develop real estate.

One way or another, those traffic lanes involve serious money!

On top of that, it’s clear from Kornacki’s report that Christie and his minions knew about the development and access to the bridge. They’re on record suggesting the access should be limited. That’s why they keep bringing up the “traffic study” nobody else knows anything about. 

But it wasn’t a traffic study at all. It looks more like a traffic demonstration: this is what will happen to your major real estate development if we cut access to the bridge by 67%. This would explain why they kept the traffic jam going for days. They had to show they meant business!

Of course, it isn’t clear yet why Christie or his pals would want to use their power this way. But it shouldn’t be surprising if it’s eventually revealed that the fate of a billion dollar real estate deal – and who will profit from that deal – had much more to do with it than some stupid revenge against a Democratic mayor who didn’t endorse the reelection of our Republican governor (even though our governor is known to be a especially vindictive).

Chalk one up for the freedom of the press, even if money had nothing to do with it.

The video with Steve Kornacki’s quite interesting report is here at the aptly-named Crooks and Liars site.

Update:  The New York Times reports that the Christie administration became very cooperative with Jersey City’s Democratic mayor, even setting up a whole day of meetings with top state officials, after Christie asked the mayor for his endorsement. When the mayor announced he wasn’t going to endorse Christie’s reelection, the state officials immediately canceled their day of meetings. So maybe Christie and his inner circle were just playing politics in Fort Lee (although playing it very badly).

Meanwhile, the Federal government is looking into Christie’s use of hurricane Sandy relief funds, some of which were used to run TV advertising encouraging tourists to return to the Jersey Shore. Two ad agencies bid on the project. Christie picked the campaign in which he himself would appear, even though it cost a couple million dollars more than the other bid. Christie was running for reelection at the time, so he must have figured it was federal money well-spent. 

We’re Causing Global Warming 2158, the Other Side 1

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There is a commonly-cited statistic to the effect that 97% of scientists believe that we are causing global climate change. Here’s another statistic:

James Powell, a geochemist and head of the National Physical Science Consortium, has surveyed the peer-reviewed articles in science journals published between November 2012 and December 2013. He found that among the 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors, there was only one article by one author who rejected man-made climate change.

But, according to Powell, even the author of that article believes the climate is getting warmer — he just thinks it’s for other reasons, like deforestation. He also happens to be a Russian scientist who expresses concern in his article that Russia will lose income if people stop using so much oil.

So much for the idea that scientists who study the issue are in disagreement, or that there is “pseudo-science by the bucketful” on both sides of the argument (a claim I recently read on another blog). That’s what the global warming-deniers want us to think.

http://www.desmogblog.com/2014/01/08/why-climate-deniers-have-no-scientific-credibility-only-1-9136-study-authors-rejects-global-warming

A Guide to Reality, Part 8

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Chapter 3 of Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality is called “How Physics Fakes Design”, although Professor Rosenberg would be the first to object that physics isn’t the kind of thing that can fake anything. His point, of course, is that everything that looks like it’s been designed in the natural world (the human eye, for example) is merely the result of activity at the atomic and molecular level, which itself results from subatomic particles doing what they normally do.

In fact, Professor Rosenberg holds that things that really were designed (like your computer) are the result of the very same natural laws. Design, wherever it appears to occur, whether the result of evolution or conscious effort, is just another illusion. 

In this chapter, however, Rosenberg is focused on evolutionary adaptation:

If the physical facts fix all the facts, then the emergence and persistence of adaptations had better result from the laws of physics alone. In fact, they had better be the result of the operation of thermodynamics. Otherwise we will have to admit that there is more going on in the universe than physics tells us there is. Some physicists may be okay with this, but scientism has to reject it. We need to show that the process Darwin discovered starts with zero adaptations and builds them all as the result of the laws of physics alone. (51-52).

Rosenberg begins by offering a statement of the three essential features of the theory of natural selection, as stated by the biologist Richard Lewontin:

  1. There is always variation in the traits of organisms, genes, hives, groups or whatever it is that replicates or reproduces;
  2. The variant traits differ in fitness;
  3. The fitness differences among some of the traits are inherited.

As Rosenberg explains, the replication or reproduction that occurs in nature doesn’t always result in an exact copy being made (mutations occur, for example). He prefers calling this “blind variation” instead of “random variation” to emphasize the point that nature doesn’t cause these variations on purpose. Most such variations yield no benefit. Occasionally, one does. A “beneficial” variation is one that tends to be passed on to the next generation. Given enough time, such variations can result in complex structures like the eye. Evolution occurs.  

Getting back to physics, Rosenberg argues that the second law of thermodynamics (closed systems tend toward disorder) makes natural selection “inevitable” (although at the end of the chapter he says that the second law only makes it “possible”). He admits that the relationship between the second law and natural selection is puzzling, since natural selection seems to increase the amount of order or organization in the world. But he quickly disposes of this objection by pointing out that the second law only requires a “net increase” in disorder over time. Organization will occasionally increase, but almost always at the cost of more disorganization elsewhere (as when organisms grow by digesting food).

Next, in the space of 11 interesting pages, Rosenberg shows how molecular activity, all subject to the second law, results in what he calls “molecular evolution” (69). As he explains it, there is a lot of “thermodynamic noise” in the universe. Molecules are constantly copying themselves, sometimes imperfectly, and forming bonds with each other. These processes result in new molecular forms. Some molecules are more stable than others, meaning that they will tend to last longer in particular chemical environments. As environments change, however, certain molecules become less stable and break apart, while others come together, just as organisms adapt or fail to adapt to changes in their environments. These various processes satisfy the criteria for evolution described above:

Natural selection requires … reproduction, variation and inheritance. It doesn’t really care how any of these three things get done, just so long as each one goes on long enough to get some adaptations. Reproduction doesn’t have to be sexual or asexual or even easily recognized by us to be reproduction. Any kind of replication is enough (59).

The same goes for variation and inheritance. I would add that these processes must occur in an environment filled with enough matter and energy to keep things moving along. Then, through the course of countless such chemical interactions over immense periods of time, complex organic molecules can develop:

Thermodynamic noise constantly makes more and more different environments – different temperatures, different pH, different concentrations of chemicals, different amounts of water or oxygen or nitrogen, or more complicated acids and bases, magnetic fields and radiation. As a result, there will be a corresponding selection for more and more different molecules (69).

And here we are today, each of us a collection of atoms and molecules, each doing its individual thing:

And so on up the ladder of complexity and diversity that produces assemblies of molecules so big they become recognizable as genes, viruses, organelles, cells, tissues, organs, organisms … and us (69).

Not being a scientist myself, I can’t vouch for Rosenberg’s account of how all this works. However, it all sounds plausible to me. If you read the chapter, you will probably feel the same way.

One closing comment: people who don’t accept the fact that natural selection could eventually lead to a particular complex entity usually argue that such a thing couldn’t possibly happen. It’s inconceivable, they might say, that the human eye, which needs a bunch of parts that work together in order to work at all, could have resulted from a long series of evolutionary steps. It was Charles Darwin himself who offered the human eye as the biggest challenge to his theory. Rosenberg mentions this issue near the beginning of this chapter but doesn’t return to it. His goal in chapter 3 is to show how adaptation gets started, not how far it can go. I think, however, that it’s unwise to bet against science in its pursuit of explanations for mysterious things like the human eye or consciousness. Too many phenomena that used to be mysterious have already been explained.

In our next installment (assuming I stay sufficiently motivated): Good design isn’t just an illusion, it’s also rare, expensive and accidental.

The Polar Vortex vs. the Noise Vortex

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Many of us cold people now know about the polar vortex. Rush Limbaugh, however, doubts its existence, suggesting it’s part of a hoax perpetrated by the all-powerful liberal media. (That’s entertainment, folks!) Weatherman Al Roker responds with a passage from a 1959 textbook published by the American Meteorological Society:

polar vortex – the large-scale cyclonic circulation in the middle and upper troposphere centered generally in the polar regions.

Meanwhile, the White House science and technology advisor takes two minutes to explain the possible relationship between global climate change and the arrival of the polar vortex in places like St. Louis. It turns out that we hadn’t heard of the polar vortex before because it hasn’t visited us very often. Visits are now more likely.