Here and there, Aslan cites some dubious ‘facts’: for instance, that Peter had come to Rome some years before Paul arrived (p. 185), but this is to slide over the fact that the Book of Acts would be more accurately called ‘the Acts of Peter and Paul.’ Aslan calls Luke (the author of Acts) ‘Paul’s sycophant’ (p.

186 emphasis original) flies in the face of what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:8-9, verses about which Aslan has nothing to say. Moreover, the claim that Paul thought of himself not merely as equal to the other apostles but even as ‘the first apostle’ (p. Some knowledge of recent scholarly writing on the relations between Paul, Peter and James (coming for example from Markus Bockmuehl and Martin Hengel) might have checked Aslan’s enthusiasm for following Baur’s interpretation of Christian origins. It was Paul who ‘transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot into a Romanized demigod’ (p. Baur, Aslan pictures a violent clash between Paul and his followers on the one hand, and James and Peter on the other. Retrieving the nineteenth-century theory of F. But he appears unaware of Bauer-Danker’s standard dictionary of New Testament Greek, used by scholars everywhere. The latter comment in puzzling in any case given that Mark’s Gospel contains three predictions of Jesus’s resurrection (in chapters 8, 9 and 10) and a repeated promise of a rendezvous in Galilee between the risen Jesus and his disciples (14:28 16:7).Īslan can read some Greek and tells readers that he can work out the rest with the help of dictionaries. If Aslan had read that commentary, he could hardly have described Mark as simply ‘uninterested’ in the resurrection of Jesus (p. Currently the outstanding commentary on Mark’s Gospel is by Joel Markus. If he had studied Raymond Brown’s classic and carefully argued The Birth of the Messiah, he might have been saved from facile judgments about the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke. While he has read widely in biblical scholarship, his book is riddled with significant and damaging gaps. But has it any real worth? What is the scholarly status of its author?Īfter securing a doctorate in the sociology of religions and a Master of Fine Arts in fiction, Aslan is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside. The short chapters, uncluttered by footnotes, make the book a quick and easy read.

Reza Aslan writes in a vivid, imaginative and popular style.

Zealot jesus of nazareth review