For those who defend Fox News

[Ben Kenobi]

Obviously you didn't get the joke. Keep trying, you'll eventually catch on.

Kentonio speaking for Poly? That's a fantastic joke, fwiw.

[DaShi]

Regarding the Man's credentials, it seems Elok was more correct than I would have guessed:

A conservatice Catholic blog! Poo poo!

[Aeson]

I always thought Aslan was Jesus...

[Alexander's Horse]

My God, you could be right

If Jesus did go on Fox they would dismiss him as some crazy Middle Eastern guy and grave threat to national security who should be taken out with a drone strike.

[DaShi]

And he'd be considered a Communist.

[Elok]

Here's a conservative, not-necessarily Catholic blog, by someone who apparently has read at least part of the book in question:

The chief point I want to make here is that in claiming that Jesus was illiterate Aslan is (a) asserting flatly a point that is seriously disputed among New Testament scholars and (b) making no new claim. Indeed, the claim was not remotely new when Crossan made it: probably armchair atheists have been making it since before there were armchairs, but among New Testament scholars it goes back at least to Light from the East by Adolf Deissmann, the first edition of which appeared in 1908.

So, in sum: Reza Aslan’s book is an educated amateur’s summary and synthesis of a particularly skeptical but quite long-established line of New Testament scholarship, presented to us as simple fact. If you like that kind of thing, Zealot will be the kind of thing you like.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/more-about-reza-aslans-zealot-than-i-wanted-to-write-or-that-you-want-to-read-probably/

[Alexander's Horse]

what if God was one of us...

Reza Aslan is a well-known and respected scholar.

My favorite part of the interview was when he had to explain that scholars disagree about things and that is normal. In the manichean Fox universe of the interviewer, that did not compute at all.

[DinoDoc]

Reza Aslan is a well-known and respected scholar.

He's employed as a professor of Creative Writing. It's like calling MrFun a respected Lincoln scholar.

[Elok]

Stephen Hawking is a very well-known and respected scholar. Don't give a damn what he thinks about Jesus either.

[Colon™]

Or space exploration.

[Alexander's Horse]

He's employed as a professor of Creative Writing. It's like calling MrFun a respected Lincoln scholar.

really? he is much more than that

I dare say Fun's CV isn't quite so impressive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reza_Aslan

[DinoDoc]

really? he is much more than that

I dare say Fun's CV isn't quite so impressive

I'm not seeing anything there that would paint him as either a well respected historian or religious scholar. Much less him being well known as either.

[DaShi]

Not to anywhere near the same extent. For some historical figures of interest--e.g., Charlemagne--there are copious sources to draw from, so scholars have something to work with. For others--e.g. Homer--we have a serious shortage of information, and scholars accept that anything they say about these people will be tenuous. Jesus is neither. There's a great deal of documentation about Him, but 99% of it is in gospels (canonical or otherwise). The first thing a secular historian does with that information is to gut the miraculous elements, which unfortunately leaves you with half of a story. The Jesus of the gospels won some people over with words, but the bulk of His following was due to the miracles. Likewise, the stated reason for His continuing to attract followers post-crucifixion--voluntary, self-sacrificial death and resurrection--is right out. You can go by what He said, but a big hunk of that is still in the context of miracles, as in the conversations with Jairus or the centurion.

What's left? A figure who attracted a large following in life for reasons unknown, and won an even bigger one posthumously on account of a pack of lies. You get a relative handful of lines of dialogue, plus a few non-miraculous actions like the driving-out of the moneychangers, to work with to fill in the gaps. What results is inevitably tenuous speculation. There are other, similar situations, like King Arthur, but at least with him historians say, "well, there could have been a chieftain near Wales around 500 or so, he might have lived in this hill-fort, and he may have had vassals named Owain and Peredur or something, but honestly all of this is guesswork. Try not to take it too seriously."

(in answer to "have I read this," no, but my agnostic dad is seriously into this stuff and my mom and I get to hear about the latest theories on an infuriatingly regular basis--and, seriously, look at this dude's credentials!)

But the basis of your argument is still that Jesus can't be studied because we can never have enough information about him. This leads to the problem of how much information is enough? Your argument, logically, leaves us with the medieval conclusion that Jesus is unknowable and therefore any serious study cannot be taken seriously. It's the type of thinking that dominated European history until the Enlightenment. Sadly, had people been less religiously conservative for long, there might have been better records of Jesus for today's historians to quibble over.

As for the gospel, you need to remember that it is not something that Jesus wrote. It was written by the apostles with the sole intent of convincing others of Jesus' divinity. It would be like using a book written by Scientologists as the definitive source of information about L. Ron Hubbard.

I think it is good that scholars explore Jesus beyond the gospel and try to get a better understanding of the type of person he was, divine or not. I'll agree, that the reports of those scholars are likely to be highly debatable, but that doesn't mean that Jesus or any other historical figure shouldn't be studied in such a way.

The truth is, without reading his book, none of us are truly able to criticize (poor credentials or not). Fortunately, there are brave souls willing to dive into these tedious tomes and report whether the trip is worth taking ourselves:

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. By Reza Aslan.

IN HIS earlier book about Islam, Reza Aslan, an Iranian-born American writer, presented a subtle view of the different layers of truth that can be found in sacred writings. For example, he explained that stories about Muhammad’s childhood are not meant to relate to historical events, but rather “to elucidate the mystery of the prophetic experience”. In any case, he added teasingly, myth is always true somehow; if it did not express a powerful truth, it would not last.

The sensibility that Mr Aslan brings to his latest book, about the founder of another monotheism, is by comparison rather one-dimensional, although his considerable gifts as a storyteller and populariser of complex religious ideas remain intact. The purpose of “Zealot” is not to contemplate Jesus of Nazareth as a source of ultimate meaning, but to investigate and describe the story of his life. The book’s underlying assumption is that if Jesus has any significance at all, it is to be found in the facts of his earthly existence. And these facts, Mr Aslan maintains, are often diametrically opposed to the story set out in the New Testament—which is one the author himself once embraced as a 15-year-old convert to evangelical Christianity.

The trouble is that neither narrative—the familiar one or his alternative—can be established as incontrovertible, so Mr Aslan’s tendency to make pronouncements with blithe certainty can grate. Only periodically does he throw in an appropriate expression of doubt.

Far from being a pacifist, Jesus for Mr Aslan was the leader of a nationalist revolt against Rome who was punished for sedition, not blasphemy. In other words, Jesus meant it when he said “I have not come to bring peace, but the sword,” whereas sayings like “My kingdom is not of this world” may well have been made up. As for the commandment to “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s”, that is a statement of theocratic resistance to Roman rule. It is amazing, in Mr Aslan’s condescending view, that so many people have failed to see this.

He argues that the universalist pacifism ascribed to Jesus was superimposed on him several decades after his death, in the climate created by the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70AD. Once Jewish resistance to Rome was more or less quashed, followers of Jesus consciously or unconsciously refashioned their faith into one that meekly accepted imperial authority and could spread easily through a multinational empire.

Many religious scholars believe that texts should be studied and decoded in the context of the eras in which they were written. But Mr Aslan places enormous, and perhaps excessive, emphasis on the explanatory power of context. Because history reveals at least something of the role of itinerant preachers who challenged Roman rule in the quarrelsome Jewish world, he assumes it is possible to locate Jesus in that world.

Context is necessary for anyone trying to pin down the historical Jesus, but such arguments can go too far. At their most ambitious, they purport to decode with perfect accuracy any piece of religious text, laying bare both the facts that lie behind it and the reasons why those facts were refracted in a certain way.

That approach refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of prophecy, which means the ability of individuals to discern important truths about the world in ways that rise above the circumstances of their lives. How people respond to prophets and their claims is an existential choice, but a belief that prophets exist—that not all concepts can be reduced to historical context—is central to any religious faith. This means that appreciating the possibility of prophecy (whatever one chooses to make of it) is vital to the work of a religious historian. Mr Aslan has shown elsewhere that he understands this, but there is not much sign of this insight in his latest book.

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21582239-perhaps-jesus-was-no-pacifist-no-angel

Looks like one to leave on the shelves.

[PLATO]

Looks like one to leave on the shelves.

Yep...nothing really noteworthy if the review is accurate.

[Elok]

I think it is good that scholars explore Jesus beyond the gospel and try to get a better understanding of the type of person he was, divine or not.

But the crux of the problem is that there isn't any "Jesus beyond the gospel." He goes essentially unmentioned otherwise. This puts scholars in the schizophrenic position of undermining the accounts they're ostensibly relying on: "Well, these parts are obvious hogwash, but these other parts we'll take deadly serious and subject to the most intense textual analysis we're capable of. We'll note textual discrepancies big and small, speculate endlessly on the exact dates of various events, and argue over differences between manuscripts of the same text. And, since even the non-supernatural parts have been pored over a hundred thousand times by religious people over the past two milennia (because some of our most complete records are portions of the most exhaustively studied book in Western history), we'll exaggerate or distort portions of them to create a person not apparent in the actual texts for the sake of saying something original."

I suppose I don't object to the process itself so much as the excessive seriousness with which it's taken. Jesus, whoever he was, lived two thousand years ago. The only significant records are religious documents from varying traditions at odds with each other, copied with dubious accuracy over many centuries, and none written within the lifetime of the man in question. You can make guesses--endless guesses--about how that man might have looked and acted. But in the end, that's all they are: guesses. And they need to be treated as such.

Today I read Tolkien's assessment of the Sigurd/Gudrun myth cycle. It's in many respects a similar sort of problem, only easier because there are reliable, fairly unbiased accounts of the historical events it seems to be based on (and they happened about five centuries after Christ). Tolkien had some very interesting ideas about them, and probably many of them were accurate. But it would be absurd to publish "Nibelung: a history of the Burgundians of Worms" based on his speculation, or anyone else's. Everyone recognizes that it's all shots in the dark at this point. Nor do we expect "the historical Trojan War" or "the historical Arthur." There's none of that humility when it comes to Jesus.

EDIT: Okay, I should be fair: there is some of that humility when it comes to Jesus, in the form of more serious scholars who make less sweeping claims than Aslan's. With a few exceptions--Ehrman, for example--they tend not to get interviews on the TV news.