Book of the week: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan

Reza Aslan's “tough-minded” book “does full justice” to Jesus’ radical tendencies.

(Random House, $27)

Lauren Green completely missed the story, said Lizzie Crocker in TheDailyBeast.com. When the Fox News correspondent recently interviewed author and religious scholar Reza Aslan on air, she couldn’t move beyond her apparent surprise that a Muslim had chosen to write a book about Jesus. The cringe-worthy exchange soon went viral online, helping secure Aslan’s book a high perch on best-seller lists and “leaving the rest of us to ask the questions [Green] ignored.” Because a reader doesn’t have to be an Islamophobe to question some of the claims made by the author of 2005’s No god but God. In Aslan’s account, Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, he committed himself at about age 30 to overthrowing Roman rule over Judea, and he died on a cross for the seditious act of violently attacking the money changers who worked inside Jerusalem’s temple.

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But the author can be overly dogmatic about his own views, said The Economist. He presumes, for instance, that Jesus’ significance cannot be measured absent the gathering of biographical fact. His facts, of course, run almost counter to those of the traditional Christian account, and “neither narrative—the familiar one or his alternative—can be established as incontrovertible.” But as much as Aslan’s “blithe certainty” grates, his greater offense in Zealot is that the book “refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of prophecy,” meaning the ability of an individual to discern truths that transcend historical context. No serious religious historian should ever reject that possibility out of hand.

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