Aslan ignores the true, historical Roman world and fashions his own imagined one, which is fatuous and (most surprisingly!) conforms perfectly to the points he wants to make about his “Jesus.” He seems to be intent on writing a script for a B-grade movie.Ĭlumsy narratives are far easier to put together – intricacy is harder to deal with. Aslan’s book shows no awareness of this whatsoever. Terms such as, “Judaism,” “Christianity,” “paganism,” “empire,” “zealots,” “oppression,” “revolution” keep popping up, without any clear understanding of what these terms actually mean in the Roman world of the first century AD.Īntiquity was as knotty and intricate as our own world.
This approach is nothing new – Euhemerus and Leon of Pella, in the fourth century BC, established the fundamental parameters of such analysis: scratch a god and you find a man.īut is Aslan a worthy scratcher? Apparently not, since his book is filled with substantial errors and contradictions, held up by vapid assertions and simplistic assumptions.Ĭlumsy narratives are far easier to put together – intricacy is harder to deal with. But that has never stopped anyone from hoodwinking the naive.Īslan wants to give us Jesus the man, without any reference to Jesus the Christ. Consequently, he has nothing to offer that might change or advance our knowledge of Jesus in history. On the scholarly level, the entire book is a mishmash of hoary theories, long disproven and rightly forsaken.Īslan’s supposed explosive and startling revelations are absurdities, like someone passionately trying to prove that the earth is flat.
As such, it is a compendium of sweeping statements and unsubstantiated generalities, backed up by lapses in logic and utter fallacy. Reza Aslan’s biography of Jesus is an anachronistic book – it is more about our own era, and the author’s journey within, than it is about the time and place in which Jesus lived.
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