I always recommend one book for friends who want some basic information on Islam: No god but God by Reza Aslan. Out of the many survey books out there on the Muslim faith and Islamic history, it is by far the most balanced, nuanced, and interesting. And at around 260 pages of text, it's a pretty quick read. I'm a big fan of his work on Islam, so I was looking forward to seeing his interview with John Oliver on the Daily Show. When I heard the title of the book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, I felt a little wary. And throughout the five minute interview, I found myself disagreeing with a lot of his premises and conclusions. By the next day, I had decided to write a blog entry based on his brief conversation with Oliver. And then, the debacle otherwise known as the interview with Fox News host Lauren Green brought Aslan into the spotlight.
Since the weekend, Aslan has made several media appearances defending his book and speaking about the infamous Fox News interview. For a few days, his face was all over my Facebook feed, with about 20 of my friends sharing the clip of the interview and commenting on its absurdity, as well as linking to articles from liberal outlets like the Huffington Post. Zealot soon rocketed up to a top spot on Amazon's bestseller list. Aslan will clearly come away from this event with a fatter wallet and, I hope, more mainstream attention to the work that he has done on religion (though I suspect he would greatly prefer that attention be drawn to his work on the basis of the quality of his research rather than because of a ridiculous interview).
This blog post, however, will not be focussing on his interview with Lauren Green. Her abhorrent anti-Muslim bias is apparent and not worth discussing more than briefly. I only hope that those who take Fox News seriously as a source of information don't see this interview as additional evidence of a creeping “Islamic threat,” now manifested by a scheming Muslim using the facade of scholarship to attack the Christian faith and undermine Western society. But the concept of Fox News questioning the motives and sincerity of Muslims shouldn't shock us. There's nothing new there.
Oddly enough considering the hype and controversy surrounding Aslan, though, there's not much new about the main ideas in his book, either. If Green and her staff had done any basic research on the book itself or on the place of Jesus in the Qur'an, they would have realized that the arguments Aslan makes are as distant from the Islamic perspective of Jesus as they are from the Christian. They are in fact much more a reflection of the so-called “Quests for the Historical Jesus” that have been conducted over the last few centuries in Western Europe and the US. All of the following claims he has made in interviews can be found in the works of previous, skeptical Jesus scholarship.
1.Jesus was a political revolutionary that fought against the Romans on behalf of the poor and downtrodden...and lost. Forget about any notions of atonement or self-sacrifice for our sins.
2.The “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith” should not be seen as referring to the same figure. In other words, the man who walked and talked in Palestine two thousand years ago should not be conflated with the theological construct of the “Christ” as depicted in Paul's writings and parts of the gospels. This is standard fare in Jesus studies, as is the idea that Paul of Tarsus was the real founder of Christianity as opposed to Jesus (whatever that means).
3.We have to read between the lines of the New Testament to find the historical Jesus. By no means should the Bible be trusted as reliable information about him, especially when considering his virgin birth in Bethlehem, his miracles, some of the more dramatic healings/resuscitations from the dead, and the resurrection. We need to peel back the layers of theology in the gospels to recover the truth. The writings of Paul, John, and Peter thus have little utility in understanding what Jesus was like.
4.The gospels are given dates late in the 1st century. Scholars inevitably vary one from another on when they claim Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written. Typically, critical scholars will give later dates, while Christian scholars will give earlier. This is often associated with issues of the Bible's reliability, since it would make sense that the more time that passes, the less authentic information there is within the writing. So after a brief discussion of the great impact that the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple by the Romans in AD 70 had on its Jewish and Christian inhabitants (an absolutely true point), he went on to say that all of the gospels had been written after this event. This is a bit of an older view, but still within the range used by skeptical scholars of the New Testament.
This blog entry is based on only a few of Aslan's recent interviews. I look forward to reading the whole book. But even from what little I've gathered about it, the Quest for the Historical Jesus looms large overhead. In the next post, I hope to briefly describe a bit more what this Quest consists of and address a few of the problems I have with it, with some help from CS Lewis.
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