What’s the story with Reza Aslan and his Jesus book?

Resa Aslan, author of the new bestseller Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, is all over the internet, and although his book is #1 on nearly every bestseller list, the reviews and profiles of Aslan haven’t all been positive.

I haven’t yet read the book, so I’m just pointing you to two articles about the man and his scholarship.  I did read his previous bestseller, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, and didn’t like it at all. That one seemed like pure Muslim apologetics: a rewriting of Muslim history to make the religion seem almost completely innocuous, if not beneficial.  Mohammed in particular was thoroughly whitewashed, including his marriage to a nine-year-old girl and his raiding of caravans. But of course the public appetite for books praising their faith, or faith in general, is seemingly insatiable.

I’m not sure I’ll read Zealot, but given the reviews and the brevity of life, I doubt I will.  But here are two new pieces on Aslan, both in respectable places. Both mention the Fox News segment in which interviewer Lauren Green, by going after Aslan in an aggressive and invidous way, actually helped propel Zealot to best-seller status. (You can see that interview here.)

The first piece is by Manuel Rois-Franzia in the Washington Post, “Reza Aslan: A Jesus scholar who’s often a moving target.”  It’s pretty much a takedown of Aslan, going after his credentials and scholarship, though it has some interesting biographical details (born in Iran, he converted when young to evangelical Christianity, and then back to Islam).

Aslan has publicly claimed that he has a doctorate in either “the history of religions” and “the sociology of religions”, but those doctorates don’t exist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he got his Ph.D.  He’s also claimed that he is “a cooperative faculty member” in the Department of Religious Studies at The University of California at Riverside.  Well, UCSB doesn’t grant those degrees.  I’m not too bothered about the Ph.D. characterization; yes, you can’t get a formal degree in the areas claimed, but you can get one in sociology, and it’s not really lying, or even exaggerating, to specify the sub-area of your Ph.D. (Aslan’s was on Jihadism).

But the second claim about being a faculty member in Religious Studies at UC Riverside is flatly wrong. The possibility for such a title was discussed between Aslan and the department, but he wasn’t invited to join. Interviewees in the piece claim that Aslan is trying to inflate his academic credentials to give him more street cred.

The main thing that bothered me about Aslan’s book on Islam, and bothers others about his new book on Jesus, is the weak historical scholarship. Aslan said many things about Muhammed in the first book that I couldn’t imagine him documenting; it often read like historical fiction. The same seems true of the new book, as least judging from the excerpts:

Aslan writes with verve, and in some sections, his book moves at a breathless, pulse-pounding pace. Jesus doesn’t just overturn the tables of the money-changers at the Temple in Jerusalem. He is “on a rampage. He is “in a rage.”

“As the crowd of vendors, worshippers, priests, and curious onlookers scramble over the scattered detritus, as a stampede of frightened animals, chased by their panicked owners, rushes headlong out of the Temple gates and into the choked streets of Jerusalem, as a corps of Roman guards and heavily armed Temple police blitz through the courtyard looking to arrest whoever is responsible for the mayhem, there stands Jesus, according to the gospels, aloof, seemingly unperturbed, crying out over the din: ‘It is written: My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of thieves.’ ”

Well, let’s face it, that’s largely fiction: Aslan’s interpretation of what happened in the Temple. And of course it presumes that episode happened in the first place. As in No god but God, Aslan often takes the stories of scripture as historical truth. Yet that’s at odds with what he says in the interview:

“It’s not [that] I think Islam is correct and Christianity is incorrect,” Aslan says. “It’s that all religions are nothing more than a language made up of symbols and metaphors to help an individual explain faith.”

If that’s the case, and Christianity and Islam are just symbolic languages, why write stories saying what you think really happened? Is he playing both sides against the middle?

Since I’m not an expert on Jesus scholarship, I was interested to note that other authors have raised the spectre of Jesus as Renegade before. As the Post notes:

Some scholars have noted that his main conclusions bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the work of S.G.F. Brandon, author of the well-known 1967 book “Jesus and the Zealots.” In a New York Times book review, Martin, the Yale professor, writes that Aslan “follows Mr. Brandon in his general thesis as well as many details.” Martin and some others would have preferred Aslan give more credit to Brandon; Aslan says the renowned scholar is frequently cited in the book’s extensive notes.

. . . Crossan [“John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest who is a professor emeritus of religious studies at DePaul University and author of many books, including Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography”] says Jesus’s approach was “programmatically nonviolent.” In a Washington Post review, Stephen Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, also took issue with that portrayal of Jesus. “What are we to make of Jesus’s apparent lack of interest in doing anything practical whatsoever to prepare for holy war? If he has come to fight for ‘a real kingdom, with an actual king,’ where are his soldiers and their weapons? And why no battle plan? The short answer to these questions is that Aslan is more a storyteller here than a historian.”

But of course Aslan is crying all the way to the bank.

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In The Nation, Elizabeth Castelli, Professor or Religion at Barnard College, also questions Aslan’s scholarship in “Reza Aslan: Historian?” She notes that he is an associate professor of creative writing (not religion) at the University of California at Riverside.  Castelli, like me, isn’t too concerned with Aslan’s characterization of his Ph.D., but she is bothered by his scholarship (remember that this is a professor of religion writing):

Aslan’s broader claim to working as a historian, however, is another matter. Frankly, he would probably have been cut a good deal more slack by specialists had he simply said that he was working as an outsider to the field, interested in translating work by scholars of early Christianity for a broader audience. But his claims are more grandiose than that and are based on his repeated public statements that he speaks with authority as a historian. He has therefore reasonably opened himself to criticism on the basis of that claim.

. . . Zealot reflects wide reading in the secondary literature that has emerged in the scholarly study of the historical Jesus. In that sense, as one colleague of mine puts it, Aslan is a reader rather than a researcher. Aslan’s reconstruction of the life of Jesus invests a surprisingly literalist faith in some parts of the gospel narratives. For example, he argues, against the scholarly consensus, that the so-called “messianic secret” in the Gospel of Mark (a text written four decades after the death of Jesus) reflects an actual political strategy of the historical Jesus rather than a literary device by which the author of that text made sense of conflicting bits of received tradition. His readings of the canonical gospels give little attention to the fact that the writers of these texts were engaged in a complex intertextual practice with the Hebrew scriptures in Greek, that these writers were interested in demonstrating that Jesus fulfilled prophecies written centuries earlier—in short, that the gospel writers were writers with (sometimes modest, sometimes expansive) literary aspirations and particular theological axes to grind. Biblical scholars have, over many decades, sought to develop methods of textual analysis to tease out these various interests and threads.

But Aslan does not claim to be engaged in literary analysis but in history-writing. One might then expect his reconstruction of the world of Jesus of Nazareth to display a deep understanding of second-temple Judaism. Yet, his historical reconstruction is partial in both senses of the term. For example, he depends significantly on the testimony of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, taking it more or less at face value (which no scholar of the period would do). Meanwhile he amplifies Jewish resistance to Roman domination into a widespread biblically based zealotry, from which he concludes that Jesus was intent upon armed resistance and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. Moreover, his reconstruction of the Judaism of the time is too flat and monolithic. At best, his argument is overstated; at worst, it depends upon scholarship that has been definitively challenged by more recent work in the field and upon a method that cherry-picks from the ancient sources.

She then compares Aslan’s bok to Albert Schweitzer’s famous book on the life of Jesus (Von Reimarus zu Rede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesus-Forschung), in which Schweitzer (yes, the doctor and missionary Schweitzer), after reading dozens of biographies of Jesus, concluded that we could conclude almost nothing about his life that is historically accurate:

. . . Schweitzer’s Quest makes the decisive and incontrovertible point, through careful analysis of dozens of lives of Jesus written over a 200-year period, that efforts to reconstruct the life of Jesus are bound to fail both because the historical archive is so irreparably fragmentary and because every life of Jesus inevitably emerges as a portrait with an uncanny resemblance to its author. Schweitzer didn’t use these terms, but his point is that lives of Jesus are theological Rorschach tests that tell us far more about those who create them than about the elusive historical Jesus.

It is to this history, I would argue, that Aslan’s Zealot belongs. Zealot is a cultural production of its particular historical moment—a remix of existing scholarship, sampled and reframed to make a culturally relevant intervention in the early twenty-first-century world where religion, violence and politics overlap in complex ways. In this sense, the book is simply one more example in a long line of efforts by theologians, historians and other interested cultural workers.

But, as I said, the public, particularly the American public, just loves stories about Jesus, particularly if they’re well written (and Aslan is a compelling writer).  And that public either has forgotten about previous interpretations of Jesus as Renegade, or think that Aslan’s interpretation is brand new.

Castelli’s conclusion is pretty damning:

Simply put, Zealot does not break new ground in the history of early Christianity. It isn’t clear that any book framed as a “the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth” could, in fact, do so. Indeed, if it had not been thrust into the limelight by an aggressive marketing plan, the painfully offensive Fox News interview, and Aslan’s own considerable gifts for self-promotion, Zealot would likely have simply been shelved next to myriad other examples of its genre, and everyone could get back to their lives. As it is, the whole spectacle has been painful to watch. And as it is with so many spectacles, perhaps the best advice one might take is this: Nothing to see here, people. Move along.

With such appraisals by historians, perhaps Zealot should be classified as “historical fiction” rather than religion, just as Stephen Meyer’s book on the Cambrian explosion should be classified as “religion” rather than science.