Greg Carey, Professor of New Testament, Lancaster Theological Seminary, responds in Huffington Post.

Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth has taken off as a cultural phenomenon. Just two weeks after Aslan’s interview on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” his interpretation of Jesus’ life and intentions has attained number one status on bestseller lists. A ridiculously hostile FOXNews interview has certainly helped. But it’s been two weeks — and as yet I cannot find a serious review by a practicing biblical scholar. This brief review amounts to my attempt to respond to the questions I’m receiving about the book from every corner.

Aslan gained wide popularity for his introduction to Islam, No god but God. I very much enjoyed my copy and still consult it. Aslan holds a PhD in sociology, but his primary scholarly emphasis involves contemporary religion. Aslan has also worked in New Testament studies, and Zealot contains references to a vast amount of literature, yet the book also betrays that he is not immersed in the literature of that field. Aslan is a spectacular writer, and his portrait of Jesus is spiritually if not intellectually compelling.

Allow me to address the common complaint that as a Muslim Aslan has no business writing a Jesus book. Aslan clearly respects and admires Jesus. That some Christians might find his claims unsettling is, well, tough, because Aslan is doing serious intellectual work. The complaints have no place in responsible public discourse.

First, Zealot has formidable strengths. Aslan has done a great deal of homework, offering material that will instruct many specialists from time to time. The most important thing Aslan accomplishes involves setting Jesus in a plausible historical and cultural context. Indeed, more of the book may involve Jesus’ contexts than direct discussion of the man himself. Someone very like Jesus could easily have existed in Roman Galilee. Aslan’s Jesus is thoroughly Jewish, passionately committed to Israel’s welfare and restoration. Aslan appreciates how Jesus’ activities amounted to resistance against Roman domination — as well as against collaboration on the part of Jewish elites. Many scholars would agree.

Any respectable portrait of Jesus must take serious account of how Jesus died, as Aslan’s does. Jesus dies as a convicted seditionist, a would-be king who finally got caught. This is a serious interpretation of Jesus’ crucifixion. Perhaps Aslan most deserves credit for his openness to the possibility that Jesus really did see himself as Israel’s messiah, or king. Far too many historians dismiss this possibility out of hand.

Many traditionalist Christians will struggle with Aslan’s handling of the Gospel stories. Maybe they don’t teach this in some churches, but Christian thought developed a great deal in the decades following Jesus’ death, a fact Aslan recognizes. I do wish he were more careful in spelling out why he finds certain Gospel traditions more historically plausible than others, but again any credible account of Jesus’ life must recognize that the Gospels do not provide direct windows into Jesus’ activities.

I would add that Aslan provides some of the most helpful discussions I have yet encountered regarding the accounts of Jesus’ healing ministry and of his resurrection. These stories represent minefields for any historical investigator. Aslan handles them with sympathy, imagination, and critical judgment.

At the same time, I have some serious reservations about Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, and I suspect that most professional biblical scholars will share some of them. First, the book contains some outright glitches, things a professional scholar would be unlikely to say. Aslan suggests there were “countless” revolutionary prophets and would-be messiahs in Jesus’ day. Several did appear, but “countless” is a bit much. Aslan assumes near-universal illiteracy in Jesus’ society, an issue that remains unsettled and hotly contested among specialists. At one point Aslan says it would seem “unthinkable” for an adult Jewish man not to marry. He does mention celibate Jews like the Essenes, but he seems unaware that women were simply scarce in the ancient world. Lots of low-status men lacked the opportunity to marry. Aslan assumes Jesus lived and worked in Sepphoris, a significant city near Nazareth. This is possible, but we lack evidence to confirm it. Click link for full article;

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-carey/reza-aslan-on-jesus_b_3679466.html

Posted By F. Sheikh

(This book is making lot of waves in US and i have heard very good comments about this. It is not a religious book but if you like history and could keep religious affiliations on side for few hours it is a very good book. There is a lot of buzz about this book in christian religious groups and FOX does not like this book at all. Shared By Afaq Kazi)

Excerpt from Book from Huffington Post;

“It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion (“I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel”; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (“Go and make disciples of all nations”; Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for unconditional peace (“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God”; Matthew 5:9), sometimes promoting violence and conflict (“If you do not have a sword, go sell your cloak and buy one”; Luke 22:36).

The problem with pinning down the historical Jesus is that, outside of the New Testament, there is almost no trace of the man who would so permanently alter the course of human history. The earliest and most reliable nonbiblical reference to Jesus comes from the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (d. 100 C.E.). In a brief throwaway passage in the Antiquities, Josephus writes of a fiendish Jewish high priest named Ananus who, after the death of the Roman governor Festus, unlawfully condemned a certain “James, the brother of Jesus, the one they call messiah,” to stoning for transgression of the law. The passage moves on to relate what happened to Ananus after the new governor, Albinus, finally arrived in Jerusalem.

Fleeting and dismissive as this allusion may be (the phrase “the one they call messiah” is clearly meant to express derision), it nevertheless contains enormous significance for those searching for any sign of the historical Jesus. In a society without surnames, a common name like James required a specific appellation—a place of birth or a father’s name—to distinguish it from all the other men named James roaming around Palestine (hence, Jesus of Nazareth). In this case, James’ appellative was provided by his fraternal connection to someone with whom Josephus assumes his audience would be familiar. The passage proves not only that “Jesus, the one they call messiah” probably existed, but that by the year 94 C.E., when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and enduring movement.

It is that movement, not its founder, that receives the attention of second-century historians like Tacitus (d. 118) and Pliny the Younger (d. 113), both of whom mention Jesus of Nazareth but reveal little about him, save for his arrest and execution—an important historical note, as we shall see, but one that sheds little light on the details of Jesus’ life. We are therefore left with whatever information can be gleaned from the New Testament.”

Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed. Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel.

Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time. The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.

Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ message and movement? To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land from the Roman occupation. For four glorious years, the city of God was once again under Jewish control. Then, in 70 C.E., the Romans returned. After a brief siege of Jerusalem, the soldiers breached the city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows, the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned. So complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains.”

Interview of Reza Aslan at Fox- Click link below

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/is-this-the-most-embarrassing-interview-fox-news-has-ever-do

Full excerpt and long interview at Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/17/zealot-reza-aslan-_n_3605667.html