ANS -- What Happens when Poor People get Cash? An Empirical Study.

This is an interesting article about how gambling money benefited the Cherokee nation.  It shows that poverty is debilitating.  There's some interesting stuff in the comments too. 
Find it here:   http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/20/1271174/-What-Happens-when-Poor-People-get-Cash-An-Empirical-Study?detail=facebook   
--Kim



Mon Jan 20, 2014 at 12:14 PM PST

What Happens when Poor People get Cash? An Empirical Study.

by Dave in Northridge Follow

Remarkably important article in Saturday's New York Times, by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, "What Happens When the Poor Receive a Stipend?" It tells the story of what happened to the lives of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians after they opened a casino in the Great Smoky Mountains in 1997. Admittedly, this is because the casino made a profit, but the lessons learned by scholars from Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UCLA who studied the Cherokees have significant implications for why Lyndon Johnson was right to enlist government forces to combat poverty.

This is Harrah's Cherokee Casino, which opened November 13, 1977 on the Cherokee reservation.

Some fascinating findings, and the debate that ensued, below the fold.

We are all qualitatively aware that the establishment of Indian casinos, as provided for in the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 has been good for the Indian nations that have opened them. But the quantitative information detailing the social consequences of "having been good" and its impact particularly on children have not been widely disseminated, and that puts us at a disadvantage when we try to explain why something like welfare works. Fortunately, the announcement that this casino would be built spurred action among academics: 

Jane Costello, an epidemiologist at Duke University Medical School, saw an opportunity. The tribe elected to distribute a proportion of the profits equally among its 8,000 members. Professor Costello wondered whether the extra money would change psychiatric outcomes among poor Cherokee families.

When the casino opened, Professor Costello had already been following 1,420 rural children in the area, a quarter of whom were Cherokee, for four years. That gave her a solid baseline measure. Roughly one-fifth of the rural non-Indians in her study lived in poverty, compared with more than half of the Cherokee. By 2001, when casino profits amounted to $6,000 per person yearly, the number of Cherokee living below the poverty line had declined by half.

The impact on psychiatric outcomes? By 2003, she was ready to publish. The psychiatric community was still debating whether poverty caused mental health problems or vice versa, so her results, she said, surprised her. What she found was that

The frequency of behavioral problems declined by 40 percent, nearly reaching the risk of children who had never been poor. Already well-off Cherokee children, on the other hand, showed no improvement. The supplements seemed to benefit the poorest children most dramatically.

She continued following the children, and the next time she published her results, she found something even more startling: the earlier these payments arrived in a child's family, the better the child's mental health as he or she grew up.

So applying money to the problem of native poverty DOES work as far as native children are concerned. But let's see what an actual Cherokee has to say about this:

Vickie L. Bradley, a tribe member and tribal health official, recalls the transition. Before the casino opened and supplements began, employment was often sporadic. Many Cherokee worked "hard and long" during the summer, she told me, and then hunkered down when jobs disappeared in the winter. The supplements eased the strain of that feast-or-famine existence, she said. Some used the money to pay a few months' worth of bills in advance. Others bought their children clothes for school, or even Christmas presents. Mostly, though, the energy once spent fretting over such things was freed up. That "helps parents be better parents," she said.

Quod erat demonstrandum, no? More studies confirm this. The UNC at Chapel Hill's Family Life Project (run jointly with Penn State), which quantifies not just income but neighborhood safety and maternal education, among other stressors, as well, have found in 11 years of research that the stressors are cumulative. Further, parents under stress rarely manage high levels of nurturing. Thus, a theme has emerged:

Early-life poverty may harm, in part, by warping and eroding the bonds between children and caregivers that are important for healthy development.

Why would this be important? Researchers at the Washington University Medical School in St. Louis followed a group of preschool children for the next ten years of their life and tracked the stressful events for each child; MRI scans taken in adolescence showed that early life stress and poverty impeded the healthy development of the hippocampus and amygdala, regions in the brain (the article says, and I'm not a scientist) that regulate memory and emotional well-being.

Naturally, these observational studies don't allow us to assume causality, because they don't solve the chicken-or-egg problems that accompany research into these sorts of issues, especially if they have political implications. To mitigate this, Randal Akee, an economist at UCLA,has calculated

the supplements actually save money in the long run. He calculates that 5 to 10 years after age 19, the savings incurred by the Cherokee income supplements surpass the initial costs ­ the payments to parents while the children were minors. That's a conservative estimate, he says, based on reduced criminality, a reduced need for psychiatric care and savings gained from not repeating grades.

What do we know now, when we divorce this from the complicated issue of Indian gaming? Extra money might provide poor children with long-lasting benefits. Admittedly, the Cherokee example might be unique, because the cash supplements came from a business owned by the tribe which had determined how to help its members, and this might avoid incentives not to work. Besides,

about half the casino profits went to infrastructure and social services, including free addiction counseling and improved health care. Ann Bullock, a doctor and medical consultant to the Cherokee tribal government, argues that these factors together ­ which she calls the exercising of "collective efficacy" ­ also may have contributed to the improved outcomes. She describes a "sea change" in the collective mood when the tribe began to fund its own projects. A group that was historically disenfranchised began making decisions about its own fate.

Professors Costello and Akee continue to think that cash made the difference, and THAT has social and political implications, because if it DOES, withholding cash that not only helps poor families but also saves society money isn't exactly rational policy. It torpedoes the ideas that if you're poor or if you're sick, you did something to make yourself deserve that.

So use this the next time one of your Facebook friends or your congresscritter or the editorial board of your local newspaper brings up the Hoover-era notions that poverty only happens to people who deserve it and that the last thing government should do is to alleviate poverty. Not so, says legitimate research. This also supplements the arguments for Indian gaming with the knowledge that the benefits gaming provides the tribes with are positive for society.

UPDATE: Despite what I said in the last sentence, this diary is supposed to be about the public policy implications of these studies in terms of the value of welfare and cash in alleviating the social problems caused by poverty, not an assessment of the ways in which people in poverty should get the cash.

Originally posted to Dave in Northridge on Mon Jan 20, 2014 at 12:14 PM PST.


Also republished by Native American Netroots.

ANS -- Fwd: How You Can Support the Workers in Your Favorite Restaurants

Hi ANS group -- Here's a brief explanation and a link to a guide to ethical eating.  It's about whether workers in restaurants are paid more than the $2.13 the law calls a minimum, and whether they get sick leave, etc.  (I feel it's particularly important that food workers get paid sick leave -- I don't want sick people making and serving my food!)
Find the guide here:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/191370334/2014-Diners-Guide-to-Ethical-Eating they also have a phone app. 
--Kim

Dear Kim,

Unfortunately, many of the people who cook, prepare, and serve food in our country's restaurants often suffer from poverty wages, a lack of basic benefits like paid sick days, and typically  have little or no chance to move up to better positions. Our friends at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROC United) have been hard at work to improve conditions for our country's restaurant workers: servers, bussers, cooks, dishwashers, hosts, among others.

ROC United's Diners Guide & app provides information on wages, benefits, and the promotion practices of the 100 most popular restaurants in America and highlights what they call "high road" restaurants -- restaurants that invest in their staff through fair labor practices -- in 10 major cities across the country, from Los Angeles to D.C. to New York City and your city.

We are excited to be working with ROC and encourage you to get more involved in your dining experience. We all care about the quality of the food we order, where it comes from, and perhaps if it is organic. We should also care about the working conditions of those who prepare and serve the food in our favorite restaurants.

We want the workers to get fair wages. We do not want them to have to come to work sick, while preparing and serving us, because they have no sick days to take off, and can't afford to miss the money they make.

ROC's Diners Guide gives consumers the tools to speak up for fair wages every time they dine out.

Please visit rocunited.org to download the free app or print the guide. There you can also find a short but very useful video on how to communicate as a valued customer with the owners and managers of restaurants you visit.

I hope you are as excited as we are to be working with ROC and supporting the workers where we dine.

Here is to a great meal and fulfilled restaurant workers,



 

 

Don Hazen

Executive Editor, AlterNet.org

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

AlterNet | 1881 Harmon St. | Berkeley CA 94703

 



 


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ANS -- Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

Here's a good summary of why worker-owned cooperatives is the wave of the future -- it's a way to supercede capitalism without the downfalls of socialism.  His writing is a bit dry. 
Find it here:  http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/20991-worker-coops-and-left-strategy   
--Kim

Economic Prosperity and Economic Democracy: The Worker Co-Op Solution

Sunday, 12 January 2014 00:00 By Richard D Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed
(Image: Workers building via Shutterstock)

Workers' self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) are a response to capitalism's failure to deliver economic prosperity and socialism's failure to deliver economic democracy.

Among factors impeding formation of an organized, politically effective new left in the United States are deep frustrations among activists interested in doing that. The decline since the 1970s (and since 2008 especially) of capitalism's ability to "deliver the goods" to most citizens has opened many minds to question, criticize and challenge the capitalist system. The remarkable Pew Research Center poll of December 2011 showed large percentages of Americans favorably disposed toward socialism. Many more would agree today. Yet left activists are increasingly frustrated by their lack of a viable systemic alternative that could attract those disaffected from capitalism.

Leftists are further frustrated because the traditional socialist alternatives fail to inspire the public or even mobilize leftists themselves. The implosions of Soviet and eastern European socialisms, coupled with major shifts in China and beyond, have fueled that frustration. So too, in different ways, did western European socialist parties' embraces of neoliberalism since the 1970s and austerity policies since 2007-2008. The Greek socialist party's collapse and likewise serious declines in electoral support for the German and other socialist parties reflect frustrations with the traditional socialisms they advocate.

Traditional socialist programs of major government economic intervention (via varying mixtures of regulation of enterprises and markets, state ownership and operation of enterprises, central planning, etc.) no longer rally much support. When sometimes they seem to (e.g., France's last presidential and legislative elections), traditional socialism proves thinly rhetorical and symbolic. Because French socialists failed to define or pursue a genuine alternative to a deeply unpopular capitalism, their support melted quickly.

Audiences offered traditional socialist visions have increasingly responded with skeptical indifference translatable as "been there, done that." Many have formed the judgment that traditional socialisms, where achieved, exhibited too many shortcomings, were unsustainable, or both. Provoked by the capitalist crisis since 2008, rapidly rising public interest in alternatives to capitalism has confronted falling confidence in traditional socialism.

The frustration of the left, given this exhaustion of traditional socialisms' appeal, arose from having no other broadly agreed-upon vision of an attractive alternative to capitalism. The left could not provide what mass audiences craved as they deepened their criticisms of capitalism's longer-term decline and short-term crisis.

Enter the notion of workers' cooperatives or, better, the awkward but more specific term: workers self-directed enterprises (WSDEs). This centuries-old idea has been revived, redesigned and applied to go well beyond traditional socialism. The result is a new vision of an alternative to capitalism that could help to mobilize a new left.

WSDEs replace hierarchical, top-down capitalist enterprises run by major shareholders and the boards of directors they select with a democratic enterprise directed by all its workers. The latter, collectively and democratically, make all the key decisions of what, how and where to produce. Most importantly, they decide how to use the enterprise's net revenue.

Governments' dependence (at municipal, regional and national levels) on enterprise tax payments thereby becomes dependence on the people as workers. No longer will a separate interest - capitalists within enterprises - use taxes or any other distributions of net revenues to shape government policies against workers or citizens. Enterprise decisions on what, how and where to produce will likewise no longer be capitalists' decisions, but instead will reflect enterprise workers' democratic choices.

The importance of such micro-level transformations of enterprises into WSDEs cannot be overstated. Because it had located key economic powers in state hands (regulating or owning enterprises and imposing planning above or in place of market exchanges), traditional socialism usually accumulated too much power in the state alone or in the state together with the major capitalist businesses it "regulated." Far too little real, institutionalized countervailing power resided with the workers inside enterprises. As a result, accountability and transparency were absent from economic life, as was economic democracy. That in turn undermined real political democracy.

WSDEs could solve that problem. In economies where WSDEs prevail, key financial resources of the state - its taxes on and/or borrowings from enterprises - represent distributions of those enterprises' net revenues made by their workers. Likewise, the use of any enterprise's net revenues to fund political parties, politicians, lobbying efforts and think tanks would reflect its workers' democratic decisions. A key structural feature of capitalism - capital's dictatorship inside enterprises - always generated the incentives and provided the resources for capitalists to bend government to the service of capital against labor. In contrast, a WSDE-based economy would abolish that dictatorship and thus its political effects.

By establishing democracy inside the enterprise, WSDEs make government responsible and accountable to the people as workers. Political democracy remains merely formal when governments' direct dependence on people as voting citizens is not matched by governments' direct dependence on people - in large part the same people - as workers. Real political democracy requires its integrated partnership with economic democracy as envisioned in economies where WSDEs prevail. Traditional socialisms' over-emphases on macro-level differences from capitalism (substituting state-regulated or state-owned for private property and state planning for market exchanges) would be radically corrected by the micro-level transformation of enterprise organization from capitalist to WSDE.

Of course, democratized enterprises would need to share powers with democratic, residence-based political structures at all government levels (municipal, regional, and national). The political consequences of enterprise decisions, like the enterprise consequences of political decisions, would require that decision-making at both social sites (enterprise and residential community) be co-respective and interdependent. Enterprise-based democracy would co-determine with residence-based democracy the full spectrum of social decisions, including any state apparatus's functions and policies.

Transforming capitalist enterprises into WSDEs in this context would radically change workplaces, residential communities, and hence, the daily life of virtually everyone. It could realize the systemic change that traditional socialisms pointed toward but never achieved: a viable and attractive alternative preferable to capitalism. It offers leftists a means to overcome their frustrations and a focus around which to regroup, existing, as well as building, new left movements and organizations.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

ANS -- Green Giants Profit From the Planet's Destruction

We are back from our vacation and I was cleaning out some old emails and ran across this important article from last May.  It's about which big "green" groups are still investing in fossil fuel companies' stock.  You need to read this. 
However, remember that when you buy a stock, unless it is from an initial stock offering, the money does not go to the company, it goes to the former owner of the stock.  What it does is, it gives the company whose stock it is a valuation.  Maybe what we need to do is to figure out how to make a stock go down in value?
Naomi Klein, the author, is a really important person in the field of progressive thinking. 
You might consider reading the comments too.  Some are pretty good. 

Find it here:   http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/17251-focus-green-giants-profit-from-the-planets-destruction   
--Kim






 
Author and activist Naomi Klein. (photo: CharlieRose.com)

Green Giants Profit From the Planet's Destruction

By Naomi Klein, Guardian UK

03 May 13

 

A new movement has erupted demanding divestment from fossil fuel polluters - and Big Green is in their sights

he movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the "Fossil Free UK" banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.

Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).

There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: "If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. We believe that educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other institutions that serve the public good should divest from fossil fuels." I am proud to have been part of the group at 350.org that worked with students and other partners to develop the Fossil Free campaign. But I now realise that an important target is missing from the list: the environmental organisations themselves.

You can understand the oversight. Green groups raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to make the catastrophic inevitable. According to the UK's Carbon Tracker Initiative (on whose impeccable research the divestment movement is based), the fossil fuel sector holds five times more carbon in its reserves than can be burned while still leaving us a good shot of limiting warming to 2C. One would assume that green groups would want to make absolutely sure that the money they have raised in the name of saving the planet is not being invested in the companies whose business model requires cooking said planet, and which have been sabotaging all attempts at serious climate action for more than two decades. But in some cases at least, that was a false assumption.

Maybe that shouldn't come as a complete surprise, since some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading, carbon offsets, natural gas as a "bridge fuel" - what these policies all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon. We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement - using the power of the market to fix market failures.

Now it turns out that some of these groups are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with is serious. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded securities, and boasts that its piggybank is "among the 100 largest endowments in the country". The Wildlife Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment of the World Wildlife Fund-US is worth $195m.

Let me be absolutely clear: plenty of green groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organisations such as Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don't have endowments and don't invest in the stock market. They also either don't take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct investments "we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil fuels, and other areas of the energy sector". However, the NRDC continues to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to "divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years".)

Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires - foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It's a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m - nearly a billion dollars - invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?

Clearly not. And it makes even less sense to raise money in the name of fighting climate change, only to invest that money in, say, ExxonMobil stocks. Yet that is precisely what some groups appear to be doing. Conservation International, notorious for its partnerships with oil companies and other bad actors (the CEO of Northrop Grumman is on its board, for God's sake), has close to $22m invested in publicly traded securities and, according to a spokesperson, "we do not have any explicit policy prohibiting investment in energy companies".

The same goes for Ocean Conservancy, which has $14.4m invested in publicly traded securities, including hundreds of thousands in "energy", "materials" and "utilities" holdings. A spokesperson confirmed in writing that the organisation does "not have an environmental or social screen investment policy". Neither organisation would divulge how much of its holdings were in fossil fuel companies or release a list of its investments. But according to Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, unless an institution specifically directs its investment managers not to invest in fossil fuels, it will almost certainly hold some stock, simply because those stocks (including coal-burning utilities) make up about 13% of the US market, according to one standard index. "All investors are basically invested in fossil fuels," says Apfel. "You can't be an investor that is not invested in fossil fuels, unless you've actually worked very hard to ensure that you're not."

Another group that appears very far from divesting is the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its financial statement for fiscal year 2012 describes a subcategory of investments that includes "energy, mining, oil drilling, and agricultural businesses". How much of WCS's $377m endowment is being held in energy and drilling companies? It failed to provide that information despite repeated requests.

The WWF-US told me that it doesn't invest directly in corporations - but it refused to answer questions about whether it applies environmental screens to its very sizable mixed-asset funds. The National Wildlife Federation Endowment used to apply environmental screens for its $25.7m of investments in publicly traded securities, but now, according to a spokesperson, it tells its investment managers to "look for best-in-class companies who were implementing conservation, environmental and sustainable practices". In other words, not a fossil fuel divestment policy. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy - the richest of all the green groups - has at least $22.8m invested in the energy sector, according to its 2012 financial statements. Along with WCS, TNC completely refused to answer any of my questions or provide any further details about its holdings or policies.

It would be a little surprising if TNC didn't invest in fossil fuels, given its various other entanglements with the sector. A small sample: in 2010, the Washington Post reported that TNC "has accepted nearly $10m in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations"; it counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell among the members of its Business Council; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest US coal-burning utilities, sits on its board of directors; and it runs various conservation projects claiming to "offset" the carbon emissions of oil, gas and coal companies.

The divestment question is taking these groups off guard because for decades they were able to make these kinds of deals with polluters and barely raise an eyebrow. But now, it appears, people are fed up with being told that the best way to fight climate change is to change their light bulbs and buy carbon offsets while leaving the big polluters undisturbed. And they are raring to take the fight directly to the industry most responsible for the climate crisis.

Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment movement organisers, told me: "Just as our college and university boards are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone." But, she added, "students now know what communities facing extraction have known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone - even the big green groups - is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or with the forces wrecking the planet."

It doesn't seem like too much to ask. I mean, if the city of Seattle is divesting, shouldn't WWF do the same? Shouldn't environmental organisations be more concerned about the human and ecological risks posed by fossil fuel companies than they are by some imagined risks to their stock portfolios? Which raises another question: what are these groups doing hoarding so much money in the first place? If they believe their own scientists, this is the crucial decade to turn things around on climate. Is TNC planning to build a billion-dollar ark?

Some groups, thankfully, are rising to the challenge. A small but growing movement inside the funder world is pushing the big liberal foundations to get their investments in line with their stated missions - which means no more fossil fuels. It's time for foundations to "own what you own", says Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund. According to Dorsey, her foundation, which has been a major funder of the coal divestment campaign, is now "99% fossil free and will be completely divested by 2014".

But convincing the biggest foundations to divest will be slow, and the green groups - which are at least theoretically accountable to their members - should surely lead the way. Some are starting to do just that. The Sierra Club, for instance, now has a clear policy against investing in, or taking money from, fossil fuel companies (it once didn't, which caused major controversy in the past). This is good news for the Sierra Club's $15m in investments in publicly traded securities. However, its affiliated organisation, the Sierra Club Foundation, has a much bigger portfolio - with $61.7m invested - and it is still in the process of drafting a full divestment policy, according to Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune. He stressed that "we are fully confident that we can get as good if not better returns from the emerging clean energy economy than we can from investing in the dirty fuels from the past".

For a long time, forming partnerships with polluters was how the green groups proved they were serious. But the young people demanding divestment - as well as the grassroots groups fighting fossil fuels wherever they are mined, drilled, fracked, burned, piped or shipped - have a different definition of seriousness. They are serious about winning. And the message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one yourself.
 

ANS -- What Jesus Wasn't: Zealot

If you have been following the controversy about Reza Aslan and his book, Zealot, then read this article.  If not, don't bother.  It's a great book review and subsequent discussion if you are interested in the subject.  He partly says that Aslan's bias is anti-Jewish, but he doesn't dwell on it.  I found that interesting. 
--Kim
Find it here:  http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/449/reza-aslan-what-jesus-wasnt/   

What Jesus Wasn't: Zealot

By Allan Nadler | August 11, 2013
21 Comments E-mail Print

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
by Reza Aslan
Random House, 337 pp., $27

Within an hour of its online debut, the number of viewers of Reza Aslan's now notorious interview with Fox News' Lauren Green had far exceeded the number of Israelites who crossed the Red Sea under the leadership of the father of all Jewish nationalist zealots, Moses. Aslan was being interviewed on the occasion of the appearance of his book that places Jesus of Nazareth at the top of a long list of subsequent, rabidly nationalist messianic Jewish zealots.

By now, Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth has come to dominate every book sales index in America, and his fifteen Fox-minutes of fame have been viewed by millions. Sales for this "scholarly" book have broken every record in the category of religious studies; the number of stops on Aslan's current speaking tour is nothing short of staggering; and it will surely require a crack team of number-crunching accountants to calculate the tax debt on Aslan's royalties and speaking fees.


Reza Aslan on Fox News.

Given such overwhelming statistics, it is perhaps understandable that Aslan himself appears to be experiencing some problems keeping his numbers, and his facts, straight. That he is numerically challenged was apparent during the Fox interview. No sooner had Green posed the first of her series of preposterous questions, all pondering what might motivate, or justify, a Muslim to publish such a provocative book about her Lord and Savior, than Aslan, with rapid-fire confidence, listed his many alleged scholarly credentials, as a "scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament, and a PhD in the History of Religions . . . who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades." He then went on to claim that he was a professor of religious history; that he had been working assiduously on his Jesus book for twenty years; that it contains more than "one hundred pages of endnotes"; and, finally, that Zealot is the fruit of research based on his "study of around 1,000 scholarly books."

That last greatly exaggerated claim is as good, or awkward, a place as any to begin an assessment of the credibility of the man and his work. Zealot does indeed provide a respectable, if spotty, bibliography. But it lists one hundred and fifty four, not one thousand, books.  Given his evident talent at self-promotion, it is hard to imagine that Aslan was holding back out of an abundance of humility. His claim regarding his extensive endnotes is also plainly false, since there is not a single footnote or conventional endnote to be found anywhere in Zealot. The book's chapters are, rather, appended by bibliographic essays, loosely related to their respective general themes. A cursory review of Aslan's own biography and bibliography also renders impossible his repeated claims that Zealot is the product of twenty years of "assiduous scholarly research about the origins of Christianity."

To be sure, Aslan, 41, has been very hard at work since graduating college with a dazzling array of projects­mostly having to do with Islamic religion, culture, and literature as well as Middle Eastern politics­but none of which has anything to do with his quest for the historical Jesus. He is, to quote his own website, "the founder of AslanMedia.com, an online journal for news and entertainment about the Middle East and the world, and co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of BoomGen Studios, the premier entertainment brand for creative content from and about the Greater Middle East," including comic books. Of his three graduate degrees, one is from the University of Iowa where he studied creative writing (the subject he actually teaches at the University of California, Riverside); the second was a two-year masters degree at the Harvard Divinity School, where he apparently concentrated on Islam; and his doctorate was not, as he indignantly told the hapless Green, in "the history of religions." Rather, he wrote an exceedingly brief sociological study of " Global Jihadism as a Transnational Movement," at UC Santa Barbara.


https://twitter.com/rezaaslan/status/228642969601863680

Speaking on CNN in the wake of his Fox interview, Aslan ruefully observed, "There's nothing more embarrassing than an academic having to trot out his credentials. I mean, you really come off as a jerk." Actually, there is something significantly more embarrassing, and that is when the academic trots out a long list of exaggerated claims and inflated credentials.

Perhaps it is Aslan's general fondness for breathless, and often reckless, exaggeration that explains his problems with the basic digits and facts about his own work and life. Such hyperbole alas pervades Zealot. Depicting the religious mood of first-century Palestine early on in the book, Aslan asserts that there were "countless messianic pretenders" among the Jews (there were no more than an eminently countable half-dozen). Among his most glaring overestimations is Aslan's problematic insistence that the foundational Christian belief about Jesus, namely that he was both human and divine, is "anathema to five thousand years of Jewish scripture, thought and theology." The vast chronological amplification aside, Judaism's doctrine about this matter is not nearly so simple, as Peter Schäfer demonstrated exhaustively in his very important study, The Jewish Jesus, and which Daniel Boyarin has argued even more forcefully in his latest book, The Jewish Gospels. Boyarin and Schäfer are just two of the many serious scholars whose works Aslan has clearly failed to consult.

This combination of overly confident and simplistic assertions on exceedingly complex theological matters, with stretching of truths­numerical, historical, theological, and personal­permeates Aslan's bestseller. And yet, precisely because Zealot is generating such frenzied controversy, this is all serving Aslan very well. But as it would be wrong to judge Aslan's book by its coverage, let us turn to its text.

Aslan's entire book is, as it turns out, an ambitious and single-minded polemical counter-narrative to what he imagines is the New Testament's portrayal of Jesus Christ.

 

The core thesis of Zealot is that the "real" Jesus of Nazareth was an illiterate peasant from the Galilee who zealously, indeed monomaniacally, aspired to depose the Roman governor of Palestine and become the King of Israel. Aslan's essentially political portrayal of Jesus thus hardly, if at all, resembles the depiction of the spiritual giant, indeed God incarnate, found in the Gospels and the letters of Paul. While Aslan spills much ink arguing his thesis, nothing he has to say is at all new or original. The scholarly quest for the historical Jesus, or the "Jewish Jesus," has been engaged by hundreds of academics for the past quarter millennium and has produced a mountain of books and a vast body of serious scholarly debate. The only novelty in Aslan's book is his relentlessly reductionist, simplistic, one-sided and often harshly polemical portrayal of Jesus as a radical, zealously nationalistic, and purely political figure. Anything beyond this that is reported by his apostles is, according to Aslan, Christological mythology, not history.

Aslan is, to be sure, a gifted writer. The book's Prologue is both titillating and bizarre. Entitled "A Different Sort of Sacrifice" it opens with a breezy depiction of the rites of the Jerusalem Temple, but very quickly descends to its ominously dark denouement: the assassination of the High Priest, Jonathan ben Ananus, on the Day of Atonement, 56 C.E., more than two decades after Jesus's death:

The assassin elbows through the crowd, pushing close enough to Jonathan to reach out an invisible hand, to grasp the sacred vestments, to pull him away from the Temple guards and hold him in place just for an instant, long enough to unsheathe a short dagger and slide it across his throat. A different sort of sacrifice.

There follows a vivid narration of the political tumult that had gripped Roman-occupied Palestine during the mid-first century, which Aslan employs to great effect in introducing readers to the bands of Jewish zealots who wreaked terror and havoc throughout Judea for almost a century. It seems like an odd way to open a book about the historical Jesus, who was crucified long before the Zealot party ever came into existence, until one catches on to what Aslan is attempting. The Prologue effectively associates Jesus, albeit as precursor, with that chillingly bloody murder by one of the many anonymous Jewish Zealots of first-century Palestine.

To address the obvious problem that the Jesus depicted in Christian Scriptures is the antithesis of a zealously political, let alone ignorant and illiterate, peasant rebel and bandit, Aslan deploys a rich arsenal of insults to dismiss any New Testament narrative that runs counter to his image of Jesus as a guerilla leader, who gathered and led a "corps" of fellow "bandits" through the back roads of the Galilee on their way to mount a surprise insurrection against Rome and its Priestly lackeys in Jerusalem. Any Gospel verse that might complicate, let alone undermine, Aslan's amazing account, he insolently dismisses as "ridiculous," "absurd," "preposterous," "fanciful," "fictional," "fabulous concoction," or just "patently impossible."

Aslan's entire book is, as it turns out, an ambitious and single-minded polemical counter-narrative to what he imagines is the New Testament's portrayal of Jesus Christ. The strawman Jesus against whom he is arguing, however, is a purely heavenly creature, far closer to the solely and absolutely unearthly Christ of the 2^nd-century heretic Marcion, than the exceedingly complex man/God depicted by the Evangelists and painstakingly developed in the theological works of the early Church Fathers.

Aslan dismisses just about all of the New Testament's accounts of the early life and teachings of Jesus prior to his "storming" of Jerusalem and his subsequent arrest and crucifixion. He goes so far as to insist that Jesus's zealous assault on the Jerusalem Temple is the "singular fact that should color everything we read in the Gospels about the Messiah known as Jesus of Nazareth." Everything! Aslan goes on to assert that the very fact of his crucifixion for the crime of sedition against the Roman state is "all one has to know about the historical Jesus." Still, as the New Testament constitutes the principal primary source for these facts as well as for anything else we can know about the "life and times of Jesus,"Aslan has little choice but to rely rather heavily on certain, carefully selected New Testament narratives.

Aslan is insistently oblivious even of the powerfully resonant climax to the single act of violence on the part of any of the twelve apostles recorded in the Gospels.

 

The persistent problem permeating Aslan's narrative is that he never provides his readers with so much as a hint of any method for separating fact from fiction in the Gospels, a challenge that has engaged actual scholars of the New Testament for the last two centuries. Nowhere does he explain, given his overall distrust of the Gospels as contrived at best and deliberately fictitious at worst, why he trusts anything at all recorded in the New Testament. But one needn't struggle too hard to discern Aslan's selection process: Whichever verses fit the central argument of his book, he accepts as historically valid. Everything else is summarily dismissed as apologetic theological rubbish of absolutely no historical worth.

So, for example, after recounting the Romans' declaration of Jesus's guilt, he writes:

As with every criminal who hangs on a cross, Jesus is given a plaque, or titulus, detailing the crime for which he is being crucified. Jesus's titulus reads KING OF THE JEWS. His crime: striving for kingly rule, sedition. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic prophet who came before or after him­ like Hezekiah and Judas, Theudas and Athronges, the Egyptian [sic] and the Samaritan [sic], Simon son of Giora and Simon son of Kochba, Jesus is executed for daring to claim the mantle of king and messiah.

(Lest the words of the titulus be mistaken for mockery, Aslan informs us that the Romans had no sense of humor, which will come as a surprise to classicists.)

Aslan is particularly fond of assembling such lists of Jesus's seditious predecessors, peers, and successors. Elsewhere, he compares Jesus's mission to Elijah's, which ended in his slaughter of the four hundred and fifty prophets of Baal; on another occasion he sets Jesus alongside Judas Maccabeus, who waged a long and bloody war against the Greek Seleucids. And Jesus is made out to be a direct forerunner of the militant rebel of the second century, Simon bar Kokhba, who battled the Romans to the goriest of ends. And so on.

The crucial distinction that Aslan fails to acknowledge is that what clearly sets Jesus so radically apart from all of these figures is his adamant rejection of violence, to say nothing of the pervasively peaceful and loving content of his teachings and parables, which Aslan willfully misconstrues and at one point revealingly describes as so "abstruse and enigmatic" as to be "nearly impossible to understand."

Aslan is insistently oblivious even of the powerfully resonant climax to the single act of violence on the part of any of the twelve apostles recorded in the Gospels, which occurred during the tumult surrounding Jesus's arrest by the minions of the Jewish High Priest, Caiaphas:

While he was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, "Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?" When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, "Lord, should we strike with the sword?" Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, "No more of this!" And he touched his ear and healed him. (Luke 22:47-51)

Matthew's version of the same episode ends with Jesus's stern and powerful admonition against any sort of violence:

Suddenly, one of those with Jesus put his hand on his sword, drew it, and struck the slave of the high priest, cutting off his ear. Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword."  (Matthew 26:51-52)

And in Mark's version of the story, Jesus protests his peaceful intentions to those who come to seize him violently, crying out "Have you come out with swords and clubs to arrest me as though I were a bandit?" (Mark 14:48).

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Unsurprisingly, Aslan dismisses these passages as pure invention. One problem with this is that Aslan sometimes justifies his own selective acceptance of certain New Testament narratives by pointing to their appearance in all three of the synoptic Gospels which, he argues, lends them a degree of historical credibility.

Another problem is that one of the key texts that Aslan uses to buttress his thesis that the proto-Zealot Jesus was planning for some kind of apocalyptic showdown with his enemies, is taken from the very same chapter in Luke:

He said to them, "But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one." . . . They said, "Lord, look, here are two swords." He replied, "It is enough." (Luke 22:36, 38)

The Jesus actually depicted here is hardly prepping his "band of zealots" for a rebellion against Roman rule by strictly limiting their arsenal to two, obviously symbolic, swords.

 

Why would the Evangelists deliberately engage in so much wanton fabrication? Aslan offers a simple explanation:

With the Temple in ruins and the Jewish religion made pariah, the Jews who followed Jesus as messiah had an easy decision to make: they could either maintain their cultic connection to their parent religion and thus share in [sic] Rome's enmity, or they could divorce themselves from Judaism and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher of good works whose kingdom was not of this world.

Allergic to ambiguities or complexities of any kind that might interfere with his Manichean dichotomy between the historical Jesus of Nazareth and mythical Jesus Christ of the Gospels, Aslan perceives everything as an either/or proposition­either the zealous, radical, and purely political Jesus of history, or the entirely fictional moral teacher and pacifistic Jesus of Christology. He takes the same approach to the Jews of Jesus's era: There existed either the violent apocalyptic Jewish bandits who mounted one rebellion after another against the Romans, or the corrupt quisling Priests, such as Caiaphas who suppressed all such activity. The passive, scholarly Pharisees who opposed both these postures, are simply ignored.

The only passage I could find in Aslan's entire book where he argues for a more nuanced approach to anything pertains to Jesus's "views on the use of violence," which he insists have been widely misunderstood:

To be clear, Jesus was not a member of the zealot party that launched the war with Rome because no such party could be said to exist for another thirty years after his death. Nor was Jesus a violent revolutionary bent on armed rebellion, though his views on violence were far more complex than it is often assumed.

And yet, elsewhere Aslan insists, that being "no fool," Jesus "understood what every other claimant to the mantle of messiah understood: God's sovereignty could not be established except through force." And it is this latter characterization which is central to Zealot.

To take account of the fact that even at the moment of Jesus's maximal zeal, when he stormed the Temple, he was also interpreting Hebrew Scriptures would seriously undermine Aslan's insistence on Jesus's illiteracy, so he ignores it. The same goes for the numerous times he is addressed, both by his disciples as well as by the Pharisees and the Romans, as "teacher" and "rabbi."

There is not so much as an allusion to be found in Zealot to the fascinating debates between Jesus and the Pharisees about the specifics of Jewish law, such as the permissibility of divorce, the proper observance of the Sabbath, the requirement to wash one's hands before eating, the dietary laws, and­most fascinating and repercussive of all­the correct understanding of the concept of resurrection, in response to a challenge by the Sadducees who rejected that doctrine tout-court.

Aslan is intent on portraying Jesus as a faithful, Torah-abiding Jew for obvious reasons: Intent on being crowned King of Israel, and as such a candidate for the highest Jewish political office, how could he be anything less than a "Torah-true" Jew? So Aslan takes at face value the Gospel's report (Matthew 5:7) of Jesus's insistence that he has not come to undermine a single law of the Torah, but rather to affirm its every ordinance.

Aslan's ignorance­if that is what it is­has serious consequences.

 

In this connection, alas, Aslan offers a most unflattering and skewed stereotype of Jesus as a typical Jew of his era, namely an intolerant ethnocentric nationalist prone to violence towards Gentiles and whose charity and love extend only to other Jews:

When it comes to the heart and soul of the Jewish faith­the Law of Moses­Jesus insisted that his mission was not to abolish the law but to fulfill it (Matthew 5:17). That law made a clear distinction between relations among Jews and between Jews and foreigners. The oft-repeated [sic] commandment to "love your neighbor as yourself" was originally given strictly in the context of internal relations within Israel  . . . To the Israelites, as well as to Jesus's community in first-century Palestine, "neighbor" meant one's fellow Jews. With regard to the treatment of foreigners and outsiders, oppressors and occupiers, the Torah could not be clearer: "You shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them and their gods. They shall not live in your land" (Exodus, 23:31-33)

As in his highly selective misuse of the Gospels, Aslan is here distorting the Hebrew Scriptures, conflating different categories of "foreigners," and erasing the crucial distinction between the righteous ger, or foreigner, and the pernicious idolator, as well as the radically different treatments the Torah commands towards each. He mischievously omits the Torah's many and insistent prohibitions against "taunting the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger having been strangers in the land of Egypt," and "cheating the foreigner in your gate", and, most powerfully, the injunction to "love the stranger as yourself." (See, inter alia, Exodus 22:20 & 23:9, Leviticus 19:34 and Deuteronomy 24:14.)

Aslan achieves the two central goals of his book with this distorted, and terribly unflattering, depiction of the treatment he alleges Jewish law demands of the foreigner. It at once hardens his argument about Jesus's "fierce nationalism," while at the same time creating an image of the Jews as a hateful bunch, profoundly intolerant of the mere presence of others in their land. It is difficult when reading this, and many similar blatant distortions, to suppress all suspicion of a political agenda lying just beneath the surface of Aslan's narrative.

What will prove most shocking, at least to those with some very basic Jewish education, are Aslan's many distorted, or plainly ignorant, portrayals of both the Jews and their religion in Jesus's day. Aside from his apparent unfamiliarity with the critically important recent works of Schäfer and Boyarin, Aslan seems oblivious of more than a century of scholarship on the exceedingly complex theological relationship between the earliest disciples of Jesus and the early rabbis. The foundational work of R. Travers Herford in Christianity in Talmud and Midrash (1903) and, three-quarters of a century later, Alan Segal's Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (1977) are just two of the hundreds of vitally important books missing from his bibliography.

This ignorance­if that is what it is­has serious consequences. For it is not only the Gospels' accounts of Jesus citing Hebrew Scriptures while discussing Jewish law that belie Aslan's portrait of Jesus and his apostles as an uncouth band of Galilean peasants. As Schäfer has richly documented, Rabbinic sources contain numerous references to the original biblical exegesis of Jesus and his disciples, including accounts of rabbis who were attracted to these interpretations, even as they came ultimately to regret and repent of their "heresy." That Aslan has not read Schäfer is made most painfully clear in his pat dismissal of the Roman historian Celsus's report of having overheard a Jew declare that Jesus's real father was not the Jew, Joseph, but rather a Roman centurion named Panthera. Aslan says that this is too scurrilous to be taken seriously. While it would be unfair to expect him to be familiar with the common Yiddish designation of Jesus as Yoshke-Pandre (Yeshua, son of Panthera), one might expect him to have read the fascinating chapter devoted to this very familiar and well-attested theme in rabbinic sources, in Schäfer's Jesus in the Talmud.

On the other hand, Aslan weirdly accepts at face value, and even embellishes, the dramatic accounts in the Gospels of Jesus's entry into Jerusalem allegedly just before the Passover, as the Jewish crowds wave palm branches and chant hosannas. But were he familiar with the basic rituals of the Sukkot festival, Aslan might somewhere have acknowledged the skepticism expressed by many scholars about the Gospels' contrived timing of this dramatic event to coincide with Passover.

I will spare readers a long list of Aslan's blatant and egregious errors regarding Judaism, from his misunderstanding of the rabbinic epithet Am Ha-Aretz (the rabbinic description, fittingly enough, of an ignoramus) to his truly shocking assertion that rabbinic sources attest to Judaism's practice of crucifixion. Aslan very effectively explains why the Romans employed crucifixion to such great effect; the horrific public spectacle of the corpses of those condemned for their sedition to this most agonizing of deaths was a powerful deterrent to would-be insurrectionists. However, he seems not to understand how particularly offensive this was to the Jews, whose Torah demanded the immediate burial of executed criminals (who were to be hanged, never crucified), prohibiting their corpses to linger "even unto the morning" as this was considered a desecration of the divine image in which all men were created.

Finally, there is Aslan's description of the fate of the Jews and Judaism in the wake of the destruction of the Temple. In his account, all of the Jews were exiled from Judea, and not so much of a trace of Judaism was allowed to survive in the Holy Land after 70 C.E.. Astonishingly enough, Aslan says not a word about the tremendously important armistice arranged between the pacifistic party of Jewish moderates led by Yochanan ben Zakai, or of the academy he established at Yavneh (Jabne, or Jamnia) some forty miles northwest of Jerusalem, and which flourished for more than a half-century, breathing new life and vitality into rabbinic Judaism in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem.

Readers with no background in the history of rabbinic Judaism will be misled by Aslan to believe that its pacification was the result of the Jews total defeat and expulsion from Palestine. Aslan seems to think that rabbinic Judaism is entirely a product of diaspora Jews who, only many decades after the Temple's destruction, began to develop a less virulently and racist version of the Jewish religion, centered on Torah study. Can it be that this self-professed "historian of religions" is entirely ignorant of the Sages of the Land of Israel who flourished in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, and whose teachings are recorded in the Mishnah, and later the Jerusalem Talmud? Or is Aslan, here again, choosing deliberately to ignore inconvenient historical truths? And none is less convenient than the fact that a significant, and ultimately dominant, faction of Jews of first-century Palestine, far from being nationalist zealots, were pacifists whose accord with Vespasian gave birth to the religion we today recognize as Judaism.

 

Which brings us back to Aslan's awful interview on Fox. Lauren Green's questioning of Aslan's right, as a Muslim, to write his book was absolutely out of bounds, but perhaps she was, quite unwittingly, onto something about his agenda. While the form taken by Green's questions was unacceptable and made Aslan look like the victim of an intolerant right-wing ambush, might it not be the case that it was Aslan who very deftly set her up? He prefaces the book with an "Author's Note," which is a lengthy and deeply personal confession of faith. Here Aslan recounts his early years in America as an essentially secular Iranian emigré of Islamic origins with no serious attachment to his ancestral faith, his subsequent teenage conversion to evangelical Christianity and finally his return to a more intense commitment to Islam. Aslan ends this intimately personal preface by proudly declaring:

Today, I can confidently say that two decades of rigorous academic research into the origins of Christianity have made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth than I ever was of Jesus Christ.

This unsubtle suggestion that Evangelical Christians' discipleship and knowledge of Jesus is inferior to his own makes it rather harder to sympathize with him as an entirely innocent victim of unprovoked, ad hominem challenges regarding his book's possibly Islamist agenda. Aslan had to know that opening a book that portrays Jesus as an illiterate zealot and which repeatedly demeans the Gospels with a spiritual autobiography that concludes by belittling his earlier faith as an Evangelical Christian would prove deeply insulting to believing Christians.

And yet, if there is one thing Aslan must have learned during his years among the Evangelicals, it is that even the most rapturous among them, who pray fervently for the final apocalypse, reject even the suggestion that their messianic dream ought to be pursued through insurrection or war. In a word, they have, pace Aslan, responded appropriately to the question "what would Jesus do?"

Finally, is Aslan's insistence on the essential "Jewishness" of both Jesus and his zealous political program not also a way of suggesting that Judaism and Jesus, no less than Islam and Mohammed, are religions and prophets that share a similarly sordid history of political violence; that the messianic peasant-zealot from Nazareth was a man no more literate and no less violent than the prophet Mohammed?

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About the Author

Allan Nadler is professor of Religious Studies and director of Jewish Studies at Drew University. This year, he is Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at McGill University and rabbi of Congregation Beth El in Montreal, Canada. He is currently writing a book on the history of heresy in Jewish thought for Princeton University Press.

Comments

y2bloch on August 12, 2013 at 2:15 am
Excellent piece. I would only add that the author unfortunately reinforces Aslan's error of referring to "first-century Palestine." The Romans (later, Byzantines) did not refer to the area as Syria Palestina until well after the time of Jesus.
pbettinger on August 12, 2013 at 12:13 pm
I am an academic but certainly not a scholar of religious studies by any stretch. Having strayed from my Roman Catholic roots, I am slowly working my way back to renew my relationship. Books by Aslan and others and reviews such as provided by Dr. Nadler certainly have given me a variety of views to consider. I would have found extremely helpful in Dr. Nadler's criticism some additional details about some of Aslan's comments: "Any Gospel verse that might complicate, let alone undermine, Aslan's amazing account, he insolently dismisses as "ridiculous," "absurd," "preposterous," "fanciful," "fictional," "fabulous concoction," or just "patently impossible." How specifically were these descriptors off target?

Paul Bettinger
"Live Free or Die"
eil100 on August 13, 2013 at 10:46 am
Whatever Aslan's faults, and I am sure they are many whereas he is hardly original, Nadler too has much fact-checking to do. Imagine this mistake on his part: "the historical Jesus, who was crucified long before the Zealot party ever came into existence"
If so, then why is one of Jesus' followers called Simon the Zealot? [Matt. 10:4].

Elliott A Green
PaulDouglasHughes on August 13, 2013 at 1:31 pm
"In a media-addled age, mere scrupulous scholarship is rarely a match for shameless intellectual dishonesty or emotional derangement." David Bentley Hart
anadler on August 13, 2013 at 7:07 pm
In response to eil100's query, which indeed "imagines" my "mistake": It doesn't require "much fact-checking" (in fact in requires almost none at all) to know that the Zealot (upper-case) party, namely the adherents of what Josephus termed the "Fourth Philosophy" emerged in the context of the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule during the 7th decade, CE. Most scholars identify Judah of Gaulanitis as the founder of the Zealot Party. The adjective zealot (kana'i in Hebrew) to depict one who is zealous for the honor of God is as ancient as the Torah's account of Pinchas the zealot (see Numbers, 25:6-12), it has nothing to do with this militant party, and was not uncommonly used as a term of praise for especially, or "zealously," pious Jews, such as Simon the Zealot.
zoolion on August 13, 2013 at 8:37 pm
This was a wonderfully researched and written article. My fault is being shamelessly bemused by mythologies, thanks to the likes of Joseph Campbell. Either way, Ms. Green is clearly an idiot, and by the same token Mr. Aslan is clearly a fake. I believe the interview, which I don't wish to see in it's entirety, was a plant that Fox easily fell for. Could we expect anything less, from either side? And here ARE two sides. In closing, is there a Christian fat w on Aslan's life? I doubt it. And that, my friends, is the difference.
craigjbeckett on August 13, 2013 at 9:41 pm
As a former evangelical Christian, the historic Jesus I encountered in my university days was extremely fascinating. Unfortunately I was studying Canadian History and English Lit...so I did not have too much time available for Jesus. Any books easily read by a lay person on the topic of the historical Jesus? I'm not sure I have the chops for Schafer's books at the moment.

vincent.calabrese on August 29, 2013 at 12:45 pm 'Did Jesus Exist?:The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth,' by Bart D. Ehrman, is a good one.
Frank Forth on November 3, 2013 at 5:00 pm Alas, I fear that Ehrman's tome on this topic is no better than Aslan's efforts on his topic. Ehrman has written a number of excellent books for the general reader. This isn't one of them.

Ews on August 14, 2013 at 6:27 pm
"If so, then why is one of Jesus' followers called Simon the Zealot? "

Pinchas, in the Old Testament, is also called Zealot. Are you suggesting that he too was a member of the Zealot party?
Background on the use of the Hebrew term "zealot" (kanai) would be useful.
janetsr on August 14, 2013 at 7:37 pm
Thanks to JRB and Dr. Nadler for this article and for the references, some of which I haven't seen before (and thanks for y2bloch for his input on calling the area "Palestine," a common error that can have political implications itself).

This is the most thorough review of "Zealot" I've seen so far. Adam Kirsch, writing for Tablet, praised the book as giving a powerful portrait of Jesus, and Adam Gopnik, of The New Yorker, thought Aslan's book not out of the ordinary as far as portraits of the historical Jesus go. I also saw an early First Things piece in which the reviewer took issue with Aslan's credentials but said he wouldn't deign to read his book.

I'd like to see even more discussion and detail.
apbrody1 on August 15, 2013 at 8:48 pm
Dear Sir:

I would have found it very useful if Professor Nadler had included references to Geza Vermes and his studies on: the historical Jesus in the context and society of his time.

Perhaps Professor Nadler would consider appending his thoughts on this subject re the studies of the late Professor Vermes.
joripo on August 15, 2013 at 10:48 pm
A serious take-down, with a real zinger at the end: Aslan as the Manchurian, nay, the Babylonian Candidate, manipulating the manipulators on Fox. The sad thing is that public life becomes viewed as a transgression by real scholars, and so along with their criticism of popular writers they relinquish their own responsibility, and possibility, to become an engaging public voice. Bravo to Professor Nadler for publishing a response in the Jewish Review. I am not suggesting he should go on Fox, but it would be nice to give Aslan credit for bringing attention to alternative readings of Jesus, and for fostering a public dialogue on this subject, as confounded as it might sometimes be.
johndavidhutsell on August 17, 2013 at 2:47 pm
thanks for an interesting, educating article. i'm going to the library to check out Schafer, Boyarin, Segal and Herford. and Celsus if i can find him.
lionsassy on August 19, 2013 at 8:40 pm
As a Catholic, I am indebted to Nadler's beautiful analysis of Aslan's book, showing his bias and rejection of Jesus's spiritualism and peace fullness. Oh, and how does a doctrinal program make a non-Jew an expert on Jewish religion and history?
luke.lea on August 21, 2013 at 10:43 pm
Aside from those quibbles, Dr. Nadler, how did you like the book?
samhilt on August 23, 2013 at 12:46 am
The argument that Jesus lived and preached as a Pharisee rabbi­without the slightest intention of founding a new religion­has been made lucidly in a series of books by Hyam Maccoby, formerly the Librarian and a Fellow of the Leo Baeck Institute in London. His background as a Talmudic scholar and his depth of knowledge of the primary languages involved first century studies gave him the wherewithal to analyze Paul's writings and to clearly demonstrate Paul's superficial knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and his ignorance of the subtleties of Talmudic argumentation. His argument that Paul was a converted pagan who created a new religion that appropriated Jesus for purposes that were never remotely his own is made with a methodological sophistication that will satisfy the most scrupulous reader. The point of entry into Maccoby's treatment of these themes is: "The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity."
ericarlsen on September 16, 2013 at 3:27 pm
I was surprised at the naivety of Dr. Nadler's essay. He is truly ignorant of a very substantial line of thinking that depicts Jesus as a Jewish nationalist zealot, or at least, sympathetic to Israel's struggle to free itself from Roman rule. Perhaps the best and most scholarly representative work along these lines is that of Dr. S.G. F.Brandon, a British scholar of Christianity's origins. His two books, Jesus and the Zealots, and The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Christian Church are required reading for anyone wishing to find out more about the enigmatic person, Jesus of Nazareth. Where Aslan goes wrong is in trivializing Jesus as an ignorant peasant, and not as a shrewd judge of men. Jesus was a proud Jew, worthy of emulation along such lines. Nothing in his earthly life suggested that he intended to found a gentile mystery-cult religion; that job was left to Paul.
eric.trott on October 4, 2013 at 1:19 am
I am not a scholar but a student of the Bible which I believe beyond a doubt to be the Word of God. Thanks first of all to Dr. Nadler for his insightful review of this book which was written by an obvious unbeliever who calls himself a one time Christian and a scholar of the New Testament and repeatedly flaunts on TV so arrogantly his "PhD". Let me say I haven't yet read this book but intend to soon. But I would be interested to know what Reza Aslan has to say about what the Bible says about him and his kind which have been around for quite some time, especially in 1 John 2 and verses 18 following.
glovie2 on November 4, 2013 at 5:11 pm
I have never made a scholarly study of religion, but as a granddaughter of a former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and a free-thinker since age ten who studied the Bible in an Episcopal high school and classical languages and ancient cultures and history as electives in college, I have long been fascinated by and pondered the concept of religious belief and its effect on civilizations and individuals. I could not help when reading this book but assume the author's agenda was to skew the non-Muslim public's view of early Judeo-Christian principles, in particular the zenophobia and encouragement of violence, by essentially equating them to the teachings in the Koran, thus correcting what he may feel is an unjustified bias against his religion. I will be curious to hear whether the members of my bookclub, whom I host tomorrow to discuss this book, were immediately struck by the author's lack of scholarly objectivity as was I.
Jordan Monge on November 25, 2013 at 4:18 pm
This was by far, one of the best reviews I've read on this book. Thank you for writing it! You are a scholar and a gentleman!

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ANS -- The Cost of Eating Healthy Versus Eating Unhealthy Revealed

This is about the relative costs of healthy versus prepared foods.  It doesn't define it, but it's a short interesting overview. 
Find it here:   http://www.care2.com/causes/the-cost-of-eating-healthy-versus-eating-unhealthy-revealed.html  
--Kim

The Cost of Eating Healthy Versus Eating Unhealthy Revealed

• by Joe Leech
• December 12, 2013
• 5:00 am

 

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"Do Healthier Foods and Diet Patterns Cost More Than Less Healthy Options?" That's the title of a new meta-analysis (the crème de la crème of scientific studies) conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health.

The simple answer? Yes, it does cost more to eat healthy than not, according to the study, published in the British Medical Journal. These findings contradict many previous studies that have concluded healthy diets are just as affordable, but meta-analysis/review studies trump those on the scientific study hierarchy.

Now the wealthier, highly educated readers may argue they can purchase and prepare healthy foods and meals that are as cheap, if not cheaper than processed and packaged foods. However, not everyone has the knowledge, skills and/or time to do the same. It's for this reason that cheaper, ready-made food options are the solution.

Food Costs in Detail

The meta-analysis investigated results of 27 studies in 10 countries, spanning from 2000 to 2011. Researchers found that snacks/sweets, grains and oils cost significantly more for healthier options, at $0.12, $0.03 and $0.02, respectively.

The big difference in food prices however was for meats and proteins, with healthier options costing an average $0.29 more per serving than less healthy options. The price difference per serving for healthier versus unhealthier soda and juices was not significant.

The Cost Difference Adds Up

The actual differences in price seem quite small on paper when broken down, but it adds up to $1.50 per day on average.

"Over the course of a year, $1.50 per day more for eating a healthy diet would increase food costs for one person by about $550 per year," said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, the study's senior author. "This would represent a real burden for some families, and we need policies to help offset these costs."

It's worth mentioning that the $1.50 per day conclusion is based on a comparatively extreme contrast. It's like comparing a very healthy diet ­ such as one rich in fish, fruits and vegetables ­ with a diet full of processed foods and meat.

The Role of Big Food and Policy Makers

The researchers feel that unhealthy dietary habits cost less because food policies and practices focus on the production of "inexpensive, high volume" commodities, which has led to "a complex network of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing capabilities that favor sales of highly processed food products for maximal industry profit."

Given the likely truth of their theory, the authors believe creating a similar infrastructure that supports production of healthier foods may help increase availability ­ and decrease subsequent prices ­ of more healthful diets. This is where Big Food and policy makers can play their part.

What Is the True Cost of Cheaper?

"This research provides the most complete picture to-date on true cost differences of healthy diets," said Dr. Mozaffarian.

"On the other hand," Dr. Mozaffarian goes on to say, "this price difference [$550 per year] is very small in comparison to the economic costs of diet-related chronic diseases, which would be dramatically reduced by healthy diets."

Considering the average American family's healthcare costs are now at $19,393, having doubled in the past 9 years, $550 per year on healthier food choices might be a worthwhile investment.

Over to you. Have you managed to craft a healthy shopping list that's cheaper than the processed, pre-prepared alternative?

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/the-cost-of-eating-healthy-versus-eating-unhealthy-revealed.html#ixzz2ng0gN2qF

ANS -- Previously unknown DNA code could help humanity defy aging and death

This is just a news report, there's no real scientific information in it, but we need to know about it.  Short article. 
Find it here:   http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/13/previously-unknown-dna-code-could-help-humanity-defy-aging-and-death/  
--Kim

Previously unknown DNA code could help humanity defy aging and death

By Travis Gettys
Friday, December 13, 2013 10:59 EST

Topics: genetic code University of Washington researchers
 

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  Scientists have discovered a second code that's been hiding within DNA that could change the way genetic instructions are read.
  A team of University of Washington researchers discovered the secondary code, which was published Friday in Science, and could help scientists better understand both disease and health.
  DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is present in the cells of all humans and most other living organisms, and scientists have assumed since the 1960s that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins.
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  But researchers discovered that information was superimposed over another set of instructions that cells use to control genes.
  "For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made," said Dr. James Stamatoyannopoulos, who led the UW team. "Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways."
  The researchers discovered that some codons, part of the 64-letter alphabet which makes up the genetic code, can have two meanings – one related to protein sequence and another related to gene control.
  These duons apparently evolved together, researchers said, and the gene control instructions appear to stabilize beneficial features of proteins and how they're made.
  The discovery has major implications for the way scientists and physicians interpret genomes and will likely change the way diseases are diagnosed and treated.
  "The fact that the genetic code can simultaneously write two kinds of information means that many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously," said Stamatoyannopoulos.

ANS -- 4 Things That Kill More Birds Than Wind Farms

Here is a short article about what kills birds.  Wind farms are not high on the list, they just get the publicity. 
Find it here:  http://www.care2.com/causes/4-things-that-kill-more-birds-than-wind-farms.html   
--Kim

4 Things That Kill More Birds Than Wind Farms

• by Beth Buczynski
• December 12, 2013
• 4:00 am

 

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Duke Energy, the operator of two major wind farms in Wyoming, was recently fined $1 million dollars for eagles and other birds killed by wind turbines. Although I've got little love for Duke Energy (they single-handedly killed 900,000 fish in North Carolina), I do care about the continued expansion of wind power in this country.

This case brings the cyclical debate of wildlife vs. clean energy to the federal level. Yes, I meant cyclical. Here's how it usually goes (in my head):

1. "Fossil fuels are killing the planet and everything on it (including birds). Let's switch to renewables like solar and wind."
2. "Oh man, birds are being killed by wind turbines, and I love birds and believe endangered species should be protected.
3. "Punish the wind farms for killing birds!"
4. "Wait, if we stop building wind farms, or use $1 million fines to discourage companies from building them, it just continues our dependence on fossil fuels."
5. "See number 1."

Then I did a little bit of research, looking to bird conservation experts about what the biggest threats are to bald eagle and golden eagle populations (the two kinds of birds that prompted the fine in Wyoming).

Interestingly, I didn't find a single one that named wind energy development as a major threat. In fact, when you compare the numbers, wind turbines are a relatively small threat (responsible for about 13 deaths a year), and there are some easy things we can do to alert birds to this new danger.

4 Things That Kill More Protected Birds Than Wind Farms

1. DDT: Depending on your age, you might remember that bald eagles nearly went extinct in the 1960s because of the widespread use of a pesticide called DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane). While this toxin didn't kill the eagles outright, it compromised the integrity of their egg shells, killing many eagle chicks before they had the chance to be born. The eagle population plummeted until the U.S. government banned DDT in 1973. However, other countries, like Mexico, still allow its use. Unfortunately, wind carries DDT across the man-made borders, so our bird populations are still affected.

2. Electrocution: According to researchers at Vanderbilt University, electrocution is among the top five causes of bald eagle, golden eagle and raptor deaths. These fatalities occur when the large birds land on power lines, and their wings or feet accidentally touch two lines and form a circuit. Bald eagles may also fly directly into power lines that are not visible in poor weather conditions. Both situations kill the bird instantly.

3. Lead: Most people know that it's illegal to kill or harm a bald eagle in any way, so poaching, while still a problem, is rare. However, the hunting of other species can still kill these majestic birds. "Lead poisoning has become one of the primary causes of death for bald eagles. This poisoning occurs when the bald eagle feeds off carrion (dead animals) that have been shot with lead bullets," explains Eagles.org. Particularly at risk are warm climates where the bald eagle likes to spend the winter, as these tend to be popular duck and waterfowl hunting grounds.

4. Habitat Destruction: Human development, particularly in coastal and mountainous areas, is another leading cause of eagle deaths. "…eagles depend on shoreline habitats and aquatic food sources, human development in these coveted areas poses the greatest threat to the bald eagle's survival," explains Eagles.org "In addition, the cutting of 'old growth forests' where bald eagles prefer to nest and perch has conflicted with the interests of people seeking lumber for housing and commercial products."

Is Renewable Energy More Important Than Conservation?

These threats to protected birds have been known for a long time, yet you don't see anyone dishing out $1 million fines to hunting organizations, commercial developers or customers of the electric company. The point is that we need to shift away from fossil fuels immediately. Oil and coal are finite resources, and every minute we spend addicted to them is speeding climate change, destroying habitat and threatening the survival of every species, including our own.

Instead of punishing wind farms, let's work to find solutions that will allow turbines and birds to coexist. At least one scientist suggested that painting wind turbines another color besides white could help, in addition to keeping wind farms away from migratory zones. Also, there's no rule that turbines have to sport three massive, bird-killing blades. Bird-safe turbine designs like this one could go along way toward minimizing fatalities

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/4-things-that-kill-more-birds-than-wind-farms.html#ixzz2nOJpjNnR

ANS -- In Which I See Conspiracies Everywhere

Here's a blog post from The Gods are Bored, the site of one Anne Johnson.  She's a teacher.  It's pretty short.  It's about someone trying to get rid of public education.... Then there's a second section on the War on Christmas. 
Find it here:   http://godsrbored.blogspot.com/2013/12/in-which-i-see-conspiracies-everywhere.html   
--Kim

Saturday, December 07, 2013

In Which I See Conspiracies Everywhere

Say what you want about conspiracy theorists. They almost always have it part right, and sometimes they have it all right. I'm going to join their ranks now. And I have some words to the wise for the conspirators. Free advice, if you will, that is free ... because they don't need my money.

On Thursday, one of my colleagues attended a teacher workshop in which some practice questions for the upcoming PARCC (don't know what those initials stand for) national high school proficiency test were revealed. One of the math questions was so difficult that the math teachers in the meeting all did it and all came up with different answers.

Cut to the conspiracy: Big business testing ($$$$) has created an "assessment" so hard that all but a few hardy, Harvard-bound individuals will fail it. When the catastrophe occurs -- trust me, reader, it will occur -- the scapegoats will be public school teachers.

Why would anyone want to vilify public school teachers? That's easy! They have collective bargaining. They have benefits. They are eligible for justly-earned pensions. Private school teachers don't get any of that stuff.

The conspirators hope that the nation's dismal performance on the upcoming national exams will have parents clamoring for charter schools, and vouchers, and "school choice" -- sending collective bargaining school teacher units into oblivion.

How do I know this is a conspiracy? Because our president, himself a graduate of a public school, is in on it.

Here's Anne's veiled threat to the conspiracy dedicated to eliminating teacher pensions: This might be a bridge too far. Our country's parents will indeed become furious when their children don't pass the proficiency test. But they might, just might, blame the test and not the teachers. I guess it might depend on who they like better -- the teacher or Fox News -- but I'm pinning my hopes on parents actually asking to see the test and to require public officials to pass it too.

A math test that even math teachers can't pass is not a test. It's an agenda.

Now to our second conspiracy: The War on Christmas.

No one has any money to spend on Christmas gifts these days. Salaries are stagnant or diminishing, and if you've got a job your credit cards are maxed out from previous gift-giving cycles. Alarmingly aware of this, our nation's retailers have solicited the help of the lunatic fringe in order to drum up business for Xmas 2013. What better way to win the War on Christmas than to buy lots of toys and electronics? Forget going to church. It's all about the swag. The so-called War on Christmas is nothing but a cynical conspiracy to get consumers into the stores. Read it and heed it: Walmart is the reason for the season.

Where this war is concerned, I'm waving the white flag. I have no money. This year it's gifts from the heart. Not that I would shop there anyway, having heard on the liberal t.v. channel that the six Waltons who own the store have as much wealth as the bottom 40 percent of our nation's population...

Six people worth the same amount as a couple hundred million Americans. You don't think there's a conspiracy or two afoot? No, of course you do! Who am I talking to here? Readers of "The Gods Are Bored!" I'm sure all three of you absolutely agree with me ... and thanks. We can all lose the war together.
Posted by Anne Johnson at 6:06 PM 5 co