My good friend John Dickson – historian, apologist, pastor extraordinaire – has a great piece over at ABC Religion and Ethics giving a devastating critique of Reza Aslan’s book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. If Reza Aslan’s outrageous self-promotion in his Fox News interview was enough to make you think he was a crank, Dickson exposes the fallacies and inaccuracies of Aslan’s book. Dickson really rips the spine out of Aslan’s portrait of Jesus by showing just how erroneous his handling of the evidence is. Dickson concludes:
The Jesus depicted in Zealot is certainly a figment of the imagination of a professor of creative writing, but he is likely to do concrete damage to the public’s appreciation of a vast and worthwhile academic discipline. Aslan’s Jesus is giving history a bad name.
See also Craig Evans’ review and I hope to have my own review for TGC at some point.
NB: T. Michael Law has a wonderful comical send-up of Reza Aslan’s Fox News interview which is positively hilarious!