by Reza Aslan
Random House, New York, 336 pages
Reza Aslan’s new biography of Jesus was released on July 16 and initially sold well. After a controversial interview of Aslan by Lauren Green on Fox News on July 29, sales escalated and the book climbed to fourth place on the New York Times best-seller list.
Green questioned Aslan’s right as a Muslim to write a life of Christ. Aslan fired back that he had all the necessary scholarly credentials; therefore, his religious convictions should not be a disqualification for writing about the founder of Christianity, any more than a Christian should be disqualified from writing about Muhammad.
Fair enough.
Aslan was born in Iran in 1972 and moved with his family to San Francisco in 1979 at the time of the Iranian Revolution. Although he was raised a Muslim, he was for several years an evangelical Christian before returning to the faith of his forefathers. He has master’s degrees in theological studies and fine arts, and a Ph.D. in the sociology of religion. His numerous articles and books include the bestseller “No God But God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.” He currently works as a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Aslan sometimes presents himself as a historian of religions and at others as a mere popularizer. In “Zealot,” he is essentially a popularizer of other people’s ideas. The biography has 215 pages of narrative, supported by about 100 pages of notes. Aslan’s references, however, are not footnoted; hence, it’s not possible to locate with precision the sources of his ideas. Moreover, his book is clearly not a careful study of the primary texts, though he does refer to them.
His basic argument is that Jesus was a failed first-century Jewish rebel against the Roman occupation of Palestine, and that his divinity was a later construct of the Apostle Paul, who never knew the historical Jesus and had little interest in him. Paul transformed Jesus, the nationalist peasant from Nazareth, into Jesus Christ, the savior of the world.
Albert Schweitzer’s “The Quest of the Historical Jesus” (1906) begins with the work of 18th-century scholar Herman Samuel Reimarus, who, like Aslan, argued that Jesus’ purpose was “to establish an earthly kingdom and deliver the Jews from political oppression.” The quest for the historical Jesus was taken up in earnest by scholars in the 19th century, and again briefly in the 1950s, and now in our own generation.
The studies of these scholarly questers are fascinating attempts to get behind the Christ of theology to the Jesus of history, but given the paucity of evidence, they tend to fall into the trap of making Jesus a projection of their own best selves. The Jesuit scholar George Tyrell famously criticized historian Adolf von Harnack for this very fault: “The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of ‘Catholic darkness,’ is only the reflection of a Liberal Protestant face, seen as the bottom of a deep well.”
Curiously, the reflection that Aslan sees at the bottom of the well is not – take note Fox News – the Muslim Jesus of the Quran but the Jewish nationalist of 19th-century liberal Protestant imagination. Aslan’s contribution is not a new interpretation but a lucid retelling of an old and largely discredited theory.
Michael Parker is a PC(USA) teaching elder and professor of church history in the Middle East.
