In Defense of Reza Aslan

Since I wrote about the latest “real Jesus” bestseller two weeks ago, its author, Reza Aslan, has taken a fairly comprehensive beating in a variety of outlets. The Washington Post ran a skeptical piece about Aslan’s tendency to overemphasize his academic credentials even when he isn’t being cross-examined on Fox News, and his interpretation of Jesus’s life has been treated dismissively by a wide range of informed reviewers, from The Nation to The Jewish Review of Books. The consensus in these pieces is that Aslan’s book makes a hash of more careful scholarship on its way to preordained conclusions, and that his portrait of Jesus as a political revolutionary is just another predictable example of the way that the Nazarene’s contemporary biographers almost aways produce (as The Nation’s reviewer puts it) “theological Rorschach tests that tell us far more about those who create them than about the elusive historical Jesus.”