Ask Reza Aslan Anything: Responding To Criticism

In the latest video from the Zealot author, he considers the negative response to his book as well as claims that he cherry-picked his research:

Readers have contributed their own criticisms as well. One warns that Zealot is riddled with historical inaccuracies, quoting from one of Christianity scholar Bart Ehrman’s many posts challenging the book:

Aslan maintains that the fundamental charge against Jesus, leading to his death, is one that in fact never appears in any of our sources. He argues that because Jesus was zealous for the land to be returned to Caesar, this was “enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as a lestes,” that is as a bandit/zealot opposed to the political forces in control of his land.  This then is what led to his arrest and crucifixion.

And what’s the evidence that Aslan cites for the authorities designating Jesus as a lestes?  None.  And why?  Because there is none.  In none of our accounts of Jesus arrest, trial, and crucifixion is he ever called a lestes, by the Jewish authorities, by the Roman authorities, by his friends, by his enemies, by the Gospel writers, by himself, by anyone.  So why does Aslan maintain that this is how Jesus was described by his enemies as the reason for killing him?  Because it is central to his thesis.  It is in fact his thesis.

Another reader addresses Reza’s claim that Jesus was a revolutionary:

Jesus also opposed the different approaches that various other Jewish groups adopted to confront Rome: the Pharisees, the Essenes, the Temple cult and Herod, and the Zealots. He opposed collaboration with the values of Rome, but also armed attacks against them – which was also a kind of collaboration! These were the ways Israel had betrayed God’s will centuries earlier, leading to its conquering by Babylon. If it kept going down this road, he felt, they’d face the same divine judgment, this time at the hands of Rome.

Jesus was thus more revolutionary than the others because he insisted – contrary to all Jewish notions of the messiah – that Israel’s goal was not to gain its own nation with a political king. Rather, it’s mission was for the whole world – God’s promised land was the entire earth, not just Judea. He took that mission on himself. He offered God the obedience of the ideal Israel. Likewise, Israel’s means for achieving God’s purpose was not to be armed revolution – violence was the tool of their oppressors, after all, and against God’s will. Jews were to stand for God’s desire for reconciliation, and thus were to practice love of enemy to the point of death – even as they struggled zealously to stop their enemies from committing injustice.

Again, Aslan’s right that Jesus called for radical social justice – the inverting of social and economic relationships. But this critique was aimed at both the Jewish state as much as the Romans. And a key component of this new society was the laying down of the sword and the welcoming of the outsider and the enemy. His was a revolution of love – love of God and other.

He also responds to Reza’s assertions about the role Paul played in forming Christianity:

Aslan presses the old saw that Paul “invented” Christianity by turning Jesus’ social movement that fixated on the kingdom of God and the salvation of the poor into a religious group that worshiped him as the Son of God. He wants to cleave the two so as to put distance between Jesus and the church. Again, there is a critical distance, for sure. But belief in the divinity of Jesus did not develop gradually. Larry Hurtado has demonstrated that the claim that Jesus was God did not evolve after decades of pagan influence and philosophical speculation. It existed as an existential part of the community within a few short years of his death/resurrection. From the beginning, Jesus was associated with the devotion reserved for the One God. This never had happened with any of the prominent figures in Judaism before. Hurtado uses historical tools to demonstrate the inexplicability (at least in terms of history) of this event. These were strict monotheistic Jews who exploded in worship of Jesus soon after his death. No other historical factors can account for this change, except that something happened to those people.

And that something happened to Paul, too. He went from being a zealous Pharisee in conflict with this new Jewish movement, to adopting its very core belief that Jesus was the chosen one of God, resurrected and alive as Lord. And, contrary to Aslan, Paul did not seek to pacify Jesus to make him more palatable to Romans and his Gentile listeners. Quite the opposite. Michael Gorman argues persuasively in books like Reading Paul that the Apostle desired to create Christian communities that would exist as counter-cultural enclaves within the Empire. Where the state proclaimed Caesar as Lord, these house churches proclaimed the Crucified Christ as the only Lord. Where Rome exercised slavery, violence, and subjugation of women, these communities were places of freedom, equality, and love among all races, sexes, and classes. There was a political aspect to all of this, even as it was religious. Such a movement was in accord with what the historical Jesus sought to bring about.

It’s worth remembering, too, that Paul’s writings are the earliest texts in the New Testament. If the Gospels highlight more of Jesus’ message of justice for the poor, they came through oral tradition added to the existing Passion narratives, and at a later date. Paul wrote just a few years after Jesus and he’s already developed a high Christology. He didn’t deviate from the message of the first generation of Christians. Both the message of Jesus as God and God’s love for the poor were part of the oral tradition and immediate reaction to Jesus.

But another reader not only found Zealot convincing, but that it bolstered his overall faith in people:

I’ll start off with a little background. I’m the son of a Walsh and a Callahan – both, obviously, very Catholic. I was the kid who wanted to become a priest, and imagined blond, blue-eyed Jesus scowling whenever I felt guilty about some minor transgression. I can’t remember the exact turning point, but it may have been when Father Moriarty berated a girl with cancer for not taking her hat off in Church. Or when my friend who was getting interested in Buddhism, but still taught CCD, was banned from attending Mass. In any case, I drifted from the Church.

As it stands now I’m just not a person who accepts any aspect of the supernatural. But I’ve still got a deep cultural grounding in Catholicism and I’m very interested in religious history. So when my folks gave me a gift certificate to the Strand for Christmas, I bought Reza Aslan’s book.

I loved it. I found it entirely credible, and it made sense of a lot of things I’d read that didn’t quite seem to add up. And it actually made me more positive toward Christianity (or, at least, toward Christians). The fact that the Church took the teachings of “a Jewish itinerant preacher swept up in apocalyptic fervor” and turned them into a message of universal love, peace, equality, and forgiveness is an incredibly optimistic statement on humanity. And not even modern humanity! This was an era where people were nailed to a post for political dissent! How crazy is that?

I don’t think I’ll ever be a Christian again, because at a fundamental level God doesn’t make sense to me. But understanding what Jesus was actually about makes the Gospel interpretation of his message fill me with a bit more hope for people.

Watch all of Reza Alsan’s videos here. Our full Ask Anything archive is here.

Email Of The Day

A reader writes:

I got a kick out of this. I’m a loyal subscriber who has read the Dish at work with no problem for years, but all of a sudden today I get a message that the site has been blocked because it falls under the category of marijuana:

Dish blocked

Congratulations, you have reached the point that you have written enough words promoting sane drug policy that your site is now being filtered by corporate IT departments for being a drug site.

Of course, as we all know, prohibition doesn’t work.  I’ll just read the Dish on my phone.

Apathetic Atheism vs New Atheism, Ctd

The thread continues:

Although I am a Christian, I generally sympathize with the desire of atheists not to have religion assumed or forced upon them in various ways. But I have to respond to the reader who was embarrassed by Christian exhortations … at a Catholic funeral service. Perhaps one could argue that a funeral (or a marriage), bringing together many disparate friends and relatives of the deceased should be a more neutral occasion than a regular church service, but just how sensitive to the feelings of the irreligious do we need to be in our own houses of worship? Atheists who cannot deal with calls for affirmation of belief in a church probably need to think very hard about going into them in the first place.

Another is also incredulous:

Your reader actually suggests alternative things the priest could have said to allow the believers in the church to acknowledge their love of Jesus without embarrassing the non-believers in the room. Because that’s who’s important here – not the Catholic woman who died.

Not the Catholic family who grieves for her. Not the friends and fellow congregants who are there to to pay their respects. But the non-believing brother-in-law, who chose not to inform his wife’s family of his beliefs, who chose to attend the funeral knowing it could get all Catholic in there (it being a church) and who lacked the common sense to realize that maybe just standing at that moment would prevent causing pain to his wife and injury to his marriage.

How would a better understanding and acceptance of atheism among the general populace have changed that moment?

A “non-theist” reader argues that the nonbeliever had less of a reason to remain sitting than a hypothetical Jew or Muslim would:

If he had an alternative religious belief, I could understand his refusal to participate (and I’m sure his in-laws would have too). But as an atheist – one who is “without god” – there’s nothing sacred that would be profaned by his participation in this instance.

I have no particular problem going along with religious gestures that don’t especially harm me, and don’t contravene any particular moral code I have, if it helps people in situations like this. In fact, because I tend to think of religion as a social phenomenon – as something that gathers together a community, regardless of the truth or falsity of the metaphysical claims behind it – I am happy to go along with these kinds of acts. That’s the rational response – the one that tries to understand the needs that these beliefs serve, rather than getting hysterical over the fact that other people have them.

Another shifts gears:

I think we need to make another distinction among atheists: by region. It was immediately clear to me that your first batch of readers to respond are not from the Northeast. I grew up in Connecticut and live in New York City, and the persecution or ostracism of atheists here is practically nonexistent. The most you will get is some disapproval expressed behind closed doors. I remember my pastor saying once that atheists had no moral framework, and I thought it was the most offensive thing I’d ever heard in my (fairly liberal) church. On the other hand, I frequently had to bite my tongue growing up Christian when friends would openly mock Christian beliefs and traditions. So I can relate to the idea of the new atheist; what I would call the evangelistic atheist. But I imagine things are very different in the South, where religion is taken for granted and is much more a part of public life.

Face Of The Day

Concerns Grow In Ukraine Over Pro Russian Demonstrations In The Crimea Region

Pro-Russian Cossacks share a laugh next to a war monument at a gathering of pro-Russian supporters outside the Crimean parliament building in Simferopol, Ukraine on February 28, 2014. Crimea has a majority Russian population and armed, pro-Russian groups have occupied government buildings in Simferopol. According to media reports, Russian soldiers have occupied the airport at nearby Sevastapol while soldiers whose identity could not be initially confirmed have stationed themselves at Simferopol International Airport in moves that are raising tensions between Russia and the new Kiev government. By Sean Gallup/Getty Images.

The Victims Of False Rape Accusations

While the men’s rights movement may be a running joke in some progressive circles, Emily Matchar takes it seriously, particularly when it comes to rape:

Take the issue of false rape accusations, which gets endless play on MRM [men’s rights movement] websites and YouTube channels. Women falsely accuse men of rape for “lots of reasons,” Karen Straughan, a 43-year old Canadian mother-of-three who has become a major figure in the MRM, told me when we spoke on the phone. Straughan mentions the case of Praise Martin-Oguike, a Temple University football player falsely accused of rape last year by a woman who was apparently angry that he wouldn’t have a relationship with her. There is also the Hofstra University student who falsely accused five men of rape in 2009, allegedly to keep her boyfriend from finding out she’d cheated on him. (The Hofstra case has become a touchstone in the MRM community, viewed as proof that a woman will ruin five men’s lives to cover her tracks if she needs to.)

The most reliable statistics available place the number of false rape reports at between 2 and 8 percent of all rape reports. Yet most people, both in and out of the MRM community, believe these numbers to be much higher. One survey found that both male and female college students believe that about 50 percent of rape allegations are false.

So while the substance of the MRM’s claims are false (false reports of rape take place much less frequently than they claim), they have identified a flashpoint issue that progressives disregard at their peril. False reporting of rape can be a life-destroying crime. It may not be especially common, but it is serious.

Malkin Award Nominee

“The gay movement has really brought this on themselves. These African countries have only been concerned about passing these laws after the global homosexual movement started pushing their agenda in these very morally conservative countries. What looks like offensive action by these governments is really defensive … We were invited by these African countries when they were confronted with the problem. And frankly, a lot of this comes down to male – you know, white male homosexuals from the United States and Europe going into these African countries because the age of consent laws are low and able to take these, you know, young, teenage boys and turn them into rent boys for the price of a bicycle. And that just outraged the people in these countries,” – Scott Lively, the American Christianist, partially responsible for the terrorization of gay people in Uganda and Nigeria.

Chaotic in Crimea, Ctd

https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/statuses/439474997594451968

And attack helicopters:

The Interpreter continues to see Russia’s actions as a prelude to war:

For days we’ve been reporting rumors that the Russian government was expediting passports for ethnic Russians wishing to flee Crimea. There was a draft law debated to this effect in the Russian State Duma. Now, this announcement on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Facebook page:

Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Simferopol urgently requested to take all necessary steps to start issuing Russian passports to members of the “Berkut” fighting force.

In other words, Russia is now urging the nationalization of Yanukovych’s riot police. Why is this important? Before Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 they issued passports to ethnic Russians.

Some background on that invasion:

[In 2008], Moscow was accused of stirring up tensions in the separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and goading Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia’s pro-western president, into ordering his armed forces to retake control of South Ossetia. Russia responded by sending in troops and warplanes and crushing the Georgian military in the five-day conflict.

But Jonathan Marcus doesn’t think comparisons to Georgia are appropriate:

Georgia was a small country that had deeply irritated Moscow and one that could do little to respond against Russia’s overwhelming military might. … Given the size of Ukraine and the divisions within its population, it would simply saddle Russia with involvement in what might rapidly become a bitter civil war. Russian pressure at the moment serves a different goal. Ukraine is heading towards bankruptcy. It needs outside funding. Moscow knows that Western financial institutions must play some kind of role. Its concern is to underline in as clear terms as possible that any future Ukrainian government should tilt as much towards Moscow as it does to the EU. Russia’s bottom line is that Kiev should resist any temptation to draw towards Nato.

Joshua Tucker sides with Marcus:

Ukraine is a much bigger country, with a much bigger population, and a much bigger military. Georgia has 37,000 active military personnel and 140,000 active reserve personnel.  Ukraine has 160,000 active, and 1,000,000 reserve.  A war with Ukraine would look very different from a war with Georgia. …

What’s really in it for Russia?

Say everything goes as best as it possibly could for Russia: Crimea secedes, Ukraine goes along with it without a fight, and Crimea eventually joins Russia.  Russia gets some nice new beaches, but do they really want a Ukraine as a neighbor which now (a) regards Russia as the biggest external threat it has, and (b) has just lost lots of Russian-speaking voters?  Wouldn’t that seem to guarantee a hostile Ukraine for years and years to come?  And would another region of Russia with a potentially restive ethnic minority, [the Turkey-backed Crimean Tatars,] be worth that price?

Leon Mangasarian adds that a full military conflict remains unlikely:

[Eastern European analyst Anna Maria] Dyner said economic concerns are an even bigger reason discouraging Russia from overt intervention in Ukraine. The Kremlin doesn’t have “a huge amount of money to spend on such a big operation,” she said. More fundamentally, she added, Russia’s slowing economy is a factor.

“Ukraine is an important gas transit country to Europe and a conflict would probably damage pipelines, further harming ties with the West,” Dyner said. “This would damage the Russian economy, which is the last thing Putin wants right now, just as they’re thinking about reforms amid weak growth.”

But Luke Harding believes that “Moscow’s military moves so far resemble a classically executed coup” in Crimea:

[S]eize control of strategic infrastructure, seal the borders between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, invoke the need to protect the peninsula’s ethnic Russian majority. The Kremlin’s favourite news website, Lifenews.ru, was on hand to record the historic moment. Its journalists were allowed to video Russian forces patrolling ostentatiously outside Simferopol airport. …

From Putin’s perspective, a coup would be payback for what he regards as the western-backed takeover of Kiev by opposition forces – or fascists, as the Kremlin media calls them. The Kremlin argument runs something like this: if armed gangs can seize power in the Ukrainian capital, storming government buildings, why can’t pro-Russian forces do the same thing in Crimea?

Meanwhile, Josh Rogin reports that the troops in Crimea may not be official Russian forces, but rather soldiers working for the equivalent of Russia’s Blackwater, probably under the direction of Russia’s military:

[Analyst Dimitri] Simes cautioned that information about the fast moving events in Crimea is hard to verify, but the message coming out of Moscow is that these security contractors were deployed by the Russian military for two purposes; first of all they want to secure the airport to ensure that thousands of pro-western protesters don’t descend into Crimea to push back against the Crimean population’s effort to establish a new government and seek some autonomy from the new government in Kiev, which most Crimeans see as illegitimate.

Second, the forces could be paving the way for Yanukovich to travel to Crimea, where he will maintain that he is still the president of all Ukraine. In fact, Yanukovich was involved in the decision to deploy the security contractors to the airport, he said. …

[T]he private security forces provide a loophole for Vladimir Putin; he can claim there is no Russian “military” intervention while using Russian-controlled forces to exert influence inside Ukraine. The plan would be to give the new Crimean government a space to hold a referendum and then elections, thereby establishing a province with some autonomy from Kiev.

Keating doesn’t think anybody would be able to stop Russia from having its way with Crimea:

The fragile new Ukrainian government, which has other problems, not the least of which is keeping other parts of the country from splitting off, doesn’t really seem like it’s in a position to retake Crimea by force, risking a full armed intervention by the Black Sea Fleet. These moves likely violate the 1994 agreement between the U.S. and Russia under which Moscow agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty within its current borders in return for Kiev giving up its Soviet-era nuclear weapons. Beyond verbal warnings, the United States certainly seems extremely unlikely to intervene.

He nonetheless warns against assuming this would a big win for Putin:

[G]aining de facto control over yet another dysfunctional pseudostate, essentially ensuring long-term tension with Kiev in the process, certainly doesn’t seem as good an outcome as what Russia thought it was getting a month ago: a government of the whole of Ukraine tied economically and politically to Russia rather than Europe. This isn’t really a great outcome for anyone.

The Silent Sex

Mary Beard speaks up about women’s voices being muted throughout history:

[P]ublic speaking and oratory were not merely things that ancient women didn’t do: they were exclusive practices and skills that defined masculinity as a gender. As we saw with Telemachus, to become a man – and we’re talking elite man – was to claim the right to speak. Public speech was a – if not the– defining attribute of male-ness. A woman speaking in public was, in most circumstances, by definition not a woman.

We find repeated stress throughout ancient literature on the authority of the deep male voice. As one ancient scientific treatise explicitly put it, a low-pitched voice indicated manly courage, a high-pitched voice female cowardice. Or as other classical writers insisted, the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator, but also the social and political stability, the health, of the whole state. So another second-century lecturer and guru, Dio Chrysostom, whose name, significantly, means Dio ‘the Golden Mouth’, asked his audience to imagine a situation where ‘an entire community was struck by the following strange affliction: all the men suddenly got female voices, and no male – child or adult – could say anything in a manly way. Would not that seem terrible and harder to bear than any plague? I’m sure they would send off to a sanctuary to consult the gods and try to propitiate the divine power with many gifts.’ He wasn’t joking.

Little Kids Are Slimming Down, Ctd

Zachary Goldfarb examines the racial disparities in the JAMA study:

We’re celebrating the fact that for all kids ages 2 to 5 childhood obesity has declined from 13.9 percent to 8.4 percent over 10 years. Yet, 11.3 percent of black children ages 2 to 5 and 16.7 percent of Hispanic children that age are obese. Just 3.5 percent of white children ages 2 to 5 are obese.

Why the disparity? Income certainly plays a central role, though this study didn’t look at that factor. Researchers have other ideas, including the fact that black and Hispanic children eat solid foods earlier than doctors recommend, watch more television, have a higher intake of sugar-sweetened and fast foods and have mothers who face higher levels of maternal depression. It’s not a hopeless situation – breastfeeding by black and Hispanic children has increased, and government programs are fighting the disparity — but the gaps are vast.

Meanwhile, Razib Khan casts doubt on the study. A reader joins him:

In your post about the JAMA study about kids slimming down, the caveats loom large.

In a nutshell, in the minds of the authors themselves, the results of this study are sufficiently shaky that they are reporting only a modest decrease. According to the authors’ own statistics, the data is sufficiently noisy that such a decrease isn’t particularly surprising [1] even if the observation were the only one they examined. However, there is an even more disturbing shortcoming of the study’s conclusion about kids, one which the authors again acknowledge [2]. While it may be at most mildly surprising to observe that large of a change if you only made one observation, if you made a lot of observations, you’d be terribly surprised if a handful weren’t that extreme by chance alone. Surprisingly, JAMA allowed this overhyped conclusion based on an unsurprising and marginal result to be published. Predictably, it has generated headlines around the web. While predictable, this is very frustrating to scientists like me.

[1] In their paper, they write:

There was a significant decrease in obesity among 2- to 5-year-old children (from 13.9% to 8.4%; P = .03) […]

In statistical parlance, they observed a p-value of 0.03 or 3%. This means that, even if there were no true change in rates obesity, noise alone could underly an apparent decrease of this magnitude 3% of the time. In biomedical studies, the most speculative and lax standard for calling a result “statistically significant” is conventionally set at 5%. There is nothing magical about 5%, but it comports with our sense of “not very likely”. Suffice it to say that most scientists consider 5% significance to hardly worth mentioning. See here, here, and here for how physicists deal with the issue of “statistical significance”.

[2] The authors admit:

In the current analysis, trend tests were conducted on different age groups. When multiple statistical tests are undertaken, by chance some tests will be statistically significant (eg, 5% of the time using α of .05). In some cases, adjustments are made to account for these multiple comparisons, and a P value lower than .05 is used to determine statistical significance. In the current analysis, adjustments were not made for multiple comparisons, but the P value is presented.

Why this didn’t undermine the whole argument in the minds of the reviewers and/or editors of JAMA is beyond me. As a reviewer, I certainly would have been been extremely skeptical of one or a handful of marginally statistically significant results, especially when the 3% result is the one generating the biggest headlines. That 3% is virtually indistinguishable from a 6% result result that wouldn’t have generated headlines.

But nevertheless, Paul Campos feels that the JAMA findings are “consistent with broader international trends”:

As Michael Gard notes in his recent book The End of the Obesity Epidemic, data from all over the world indicate that, over the past ten to 15 years, obesity rates have leveled off or declined among adults and children. This is an awkward development for obesity fear-mongers, who as Gard and others have pointed out, have repeatedly claimed that within another generation or two the entire population of some nations, most notably the United States, would be fat.

The claim that obesity is an epidemic phenomenon, and that its prevalence was on the way to approaching 100 percent, has always been crucial to the other claims of the anti-fat industry, most notably that today’s children will have shorter lifespans than their parents, and that obesity is as great a threat to public health as global warming. There has never been any real evidence for these claims: life expectancy continues to rise, overall health continues to improve, and today’s young people are healthier than their parents were at the same age. Faced with these inconvenient facts, the obesity police have always argued that, while it’s true we’re not seeing the supposedly devastating effects of a heavier population at the moment, we will surely see these effects if present trends continue.