New Testament scholar Craig Evans recently wrote this pointed, detailed review of Reza Aslan’s book, Zealot. The review spans several pages, so make sure to click through at the bottom of the first page.Evans has a long scholarly publishing resume and is known and respected in the fields of Jesus research, New Testament, and Second Temple Jewish studies. And for anyone wondering, he’s no “fundamentalist” Christian scholar, either.
For those who may not recall, this was the book that the mainstream media and “we decide what books will be in stores” publishing establishment fawned over when it first appeared many months ago. As Evans notes, it’s just rehashed, long-debunked thinking about Jesus. When someone like Evans refers to your book as “riddled with errors” it matters — at least to anyone interested in things like accuracy and truth.
Reza has no evidence of a nationalistic Jesus. If he has chosen to believe that to make his apostate position more palatable to him, that’s his business.
I’ve seen documentaries that posit the same thing before Reza’s day. “Anti Roman revolutionary”!
Jesus irked the Jerusalem Jewish leaders, not the Romans. Pilate tried hard to get out of executing Jesus and the sanhedrin tried hard to see that He failed at that.
Since the historic Christian anti semitism and then the holocaust, it is hard for we Christians to state the truth here, but, it was Jewish leaders in Jerusalem who wanted Jesus dead, not the pagan Romans.
We just needed from that day and need to recognize it was ONLY the 30 AD leadership that was culpable and they paid for that already.
A more thorough reading of the documents of the early Christian church place the blame for the death of Jesus squarely where it might be expected; not on the Roman’s heads, not on the Jewish leadership, but on the “rulers of this age”. It was a particularly spiritual event.
yes (see 1 Cor 2:6ff. as an example).