Aslan's Zealot: A Theoretically Possible Jesus

I've just started reading Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, in which Reza Aslan portrays Jesus as a political revolutionary opposed both to Romans occupying Palestine and the Jewish elite who cooperated with them, rather than the peace loving rabbi that so many see in the gospels.  Aslan had been criticized on the grounds that he is not an expert in the field, he arbitrarily declares those passages in the gospels that support his position authentic and those which do not invented, he states his conclusions with an unwarranted degree or certainty.  All those criticism may be justified, although the latter two are true of so many historical Jesus scholars that it is hard for me to judge Aslan too harshly for them.  Nevertheless, I think that there is some logic in his approach.

If as it is often claimed, the most indisputable fact known about the historical Jesus is that he was crucified by the Romans, doesn't it make sense to start by looking at other people who were crucified and the kinds of things that led to their crucifixion?  Everything in the gospels was written after his death for the purpose of proclaiming him as God's anointed one who was exalted by resurrection from the dead.  Many stories like the birth narratives were clearly invented for that purpose and any story might have been invented for that purpose.  If any parts of the gospels are actual events in the life of the historical Jesus, I can certainly see an argument that they are most likely to be the ones that are consistent with what we know about other first century messianic claimants who were executed by the Romans for sedition.

In any case, Aslan is an entertaining writer and I am learning a lot about the political turmoil in first century Palestine that eventually led the Romans to destroy Jerusalem in 70 A.D.  When Aslan writes about Jesus, it smacks more of historical fiction rather than history, but I think that a person can learn a lot from well researched historical fiction.  I suspect that Aslan's historical Jesus is as objectively probable as most of the others.