For those who defend Fox News

[DinoDoc]

You're not inferring that you learned little from a Fox interview, are you?

You seem to be the one inferring things here, not him.

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Why would a democrat want to promote democracy by writing a book about a republican.

[Colon™]

You seem to be the one inferring things here, not him.

I infer you are a little touchy when it comes to Fox News.

[giblets]

Why would a democrat want to promote democracy by writing a book about a republican.

All books democrats write, including books about Reagan, exist for the purpose of assimilating others into the democrat collective. Since many republicans are interested in Reagan, writing about him is effective bait for drawing them in with subliminal mind tricks. Luckily the lady in this video didn't bother to read the guy's book about Jesus before interviewing him or he might have converted her to Islam.

[PLATO]

I don't think the guy was a dick. I think he had valid points and made them well. As for the book? Who knows? I haven't read it so can not offer an opinion on its content. The interview certainly didn't provide any insight whatsoever.

[kentonio]

It's making the rounds on Facebook. The weird thing is, he's not actually a particularly impressive historian; he has advanced degrees in theology, sociology, and creative writing, but minimal grounding in ancient history. If she'd attacked him on his scanty credentials (or on the general tiresome silliness of the whole "historical Jesus" quest in the first place), she might have gotten somewhere.

Fair enough on the ancient credentials part, but WTF on the historical Jesus front!?! Unless you begin with the preconception that Christianity as a supernatural belief system is actually true, how can any person with an interest in history not be fascinated by the historical figure of Jesus?! We're talking about someone who founded the biggest religion on earth which has so far lasted for two millenia for goodness sake!

Let's be honest, though... Reza was kind of a dick. Of course people are going to wonder about a Muslim writing a book on Jesus. The proper response is to acknowledge that and then say he's not writing it from a Muslim point of view, but a scholarly one. Instead his answer drips with condescension.

His answer was phrased in exactly the tone she deserved for such a ridiculous, shallow and simply idiotic question. A question which she repeated several times in various forms lets not forget.

[kentonio]

I don't think the guy was a dick. I think he had valid points and made them well. As for the book? Who knows? I haven't read it so can not offer an opinion on its content. The interview certainly didn't provide any insight whatsoever.

Amen.

[MrFun]

I think Aslan was just replying in kind; she started the interview with those asinine questions, he was more than justified in using that tone of voice with her. I'm not sure I wouldn't have just called her a stupid ****ing ******* and walked off the set.

Totally agree. He could have been meaner if he wanted to, given the asinine behavior of the interviewer.

Imran and others need to understand that one needs to use simple, mono-syllable words and speak more slowly when explaining things to a Faux News interviewer.

[MrFun]

I don't think the guy was a dick.

[Imran Siddiqui]

His answer was phrased in exactly the tone she deserved for such a ridiculous, shallow and simply idiotic question. A question which she repeated several times in various forms lets not forget.

Please. Tons of interviews (edit: ok, maybe this is just an American thing. It happens all the time on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox) ask silly opening questions in order to get the interviewee to turn aside viewer expectation. His launching into "I have 4 PHDs" just came across as ridiculously smarmy. I didn't get a good impression at all of him from the interview.

[Elok]

Fair enough on the ancient credentials part, but WTF on the historical Jesus front!?! Unless you begin with the preconception that Christianity as a supernatural belief system is actually true, how can any person with an interest in history not be fascinated by the historical figure of Jesus?! We're talking about someone who founded the biggest religion on earth which has so far lasted for two millenia for goodness sake!

Well, here's the funny thing about "the historical Jesus": everyone who looks for him seems to find that, for some reason, the real, historical Jesus had opinions/beliefs very similar to the person looking for him. Scholars of a hard-economic-left persuasion find that he was a hardcore agitator for the impoverished; feminists discover a feminist; your real radicals find a violent Jewish-nationalist revolutionary; presumptively queer theorists find a whole lot of heretofore unknown information about "the disciple whom Jesus loved."

This is what happens when your primary sources for a person are a limited set of religious texts (from various religious traditions you don't believe in): in order to find the "real person" who was ostensibly obscured by mysticism and later accretions, you have to resort to ridiculously tenuous guesswork and hazy assumptions, putting extra weight on some parts of some gospels while minimizing other parts of other gospels. All without any particularly strong grounds for making such a call in any given direction. The inevitable result is a "historical Jesus" that says more about the historian than about the actual Jesus of Nazareth.

Whoever the "historical Jesus" was, he's gone know. All that's left is Jesus Christ, the incarnate God. And, since Jesus Christ is the one who gets the actual worship--the subject of real interest for the vast majority of interested parties--why bother digging? Jesus Christ founded the biggest religion on earth. The Historical Jesus is nobody.

[kentonio]

It's not about his personality, its about how his actions affected his surroundings, and that's not confined to sources that are just religious texts.

[Elok]

And that widens things to...what, a couple of lines each in Josephus and Tacitus?

[kentonio]

Have you read the book in question?

[DinoDoc]

Have you read the book in question?

Have you?