Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Author’s Note
    When I was fifteen years old, I found Jesus.
    I spent the summer of my sophomore year at an evangelical youth camp in Northern California,
     a place of timbered fields and boundless blue skies, where, given enough time and
     stillness and soft-spoken encouragement, one could not help but hear the voice of
     God. Amidst the man-made lakes and majestic pines my friends and I sang songs, played
     games, and swapped secrets, rollicking in our freedom from the pressures of home and
     school. In the evenings, we gathered in a firelit assembly hall at the center of the
     camp. It was there that I heard a remarkable story that would change my life forever.
    Two thousand years ago, I was told, in an ancient land called Galilee, the God of
     heaven and earth was born in the form of a helpless child. The child grew into a blameless
     man. The man became the Christ, the savior of humanity. Through his words and miraculous
     deeds, he challenged the Jews, who thought they were the chosen of God, and in return
     the Jews had him nailed to a cross. Though he could have saved himself from that gruesome
     death, he freely chose to die. His death was the point of it all, for his sacrifice
     freed us all from the burden of our sins. But the storydid not end there, because three days later, he rose again, exalted and divine, so
     that now, all who believe in him and accept him into their hearts will also never
     die, but have eternal life.
    For a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this
     was truly the greatest story ever told. Never before had I felt so intimately the
     pull of God. In Iran, the place of my birth, I was Muslim in much the way I was Persian.
     My religion and my ethnicity were mutual and linked. Like most people born into a
     religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.
     After the Iranian revolution forced my family to flee our home, religion in general,
     and Islam in particular, became taboo in our household. Islam was shorthand for everything
     we had lost to the mullahs who now ruled Iran. My mother still prayed when no one
     was looking, and you could still find a stray Quran or two hidden in a closet or a
     drawer somewhere. But, for the most part, our lives were scrubbed of all trace of
     God.
    That was just fine with me. After all, in the America of the 1980s, being Muslim was
     like being from Mars. My faith was a bruise, the most obvious symbol of my otherness;
     it needed to be concealed.
    Jesus, on the other hand,
was
America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into
     my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American. I do not mean to say
     that mine was a conversion of convenience. On the contrary, I burned with absolute
     devotion to my newfound faith. I was presented with a Jesus who was less “Lord and
     Savior” than he was a best friend, someone with whom I could have a deep and personal
     relationship. As a teenager trying to make sense of an indeterminate world I had only
     just become aware of, this was an invitation I could not refuse.
    The moment I returned home from camp, I began eagerly to share the good news of Jesus
     Christ with my friends and family, my neighbors and classmates, with people I’d just
     met and with strangers on the street: those who heard it gladly, and those who threw
     itback in my face. Yet something unexpected happened in my quest to save the souls of
     the world. The more I probed the Bible to arm myself against the doubts of unbelievers,
     the more distance I discovered between the Jesus of the gospels and the Jesus of history—between
     Jesus the Christ and Jesus of Nazareth. In college, where I began my formal study
     of the history of religions, that initial discomfort soon ballooned into full-blown
     doubts of my own.
    The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional
     belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant.
     The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, that the
     Bible is replete with the most blatant and obvious errors and contradictions—just
     as one would expect from a document written by hundreds of hands across thousands
     of years—left me confused and spiritually unmoored. And so, like many people in my
     situation, I angrily discarded my faith as if it were a costly forgery I had