I confess that today is week three of being back on my Sabbath routine. Feeling good about the results so far, and hoping to remain faithful to the discipline.<\/p>\n
I confess that I\u2019m pretty stoked to be able to catch Jimmy Fallon live on The Tonight Show a little more often as of Feb. 17th. I watched his farewell show Friday night, and it was so endearing. He actually seems like one of the good guys in entertainment \u2013 Andy Samberg too, for that matter (he was Fallon\u2019s final guest). I can\u2019t wait to see what Fallon can do with the bigger platform & budget.<\/p>\n
I confess that our family has been watching quite a bit of the Olympic Games. I feel really sorry for him, but Bob Costas\u2019s crazy eye is freaking me out. As we watch I\u2019m aware that when they are grown up my kids will feel about Bob Costas the way I feel about Jim McKay. That\u2019s pretty cool. I confess that I am a sucker for the men\u2019s downhill \u2013 really any alpine skiing. It\u2019s so much fun to watch. I confess that the slope-side snowboarding has been fun to watch as well, although the interviews in the sport of snowboarding are so stinking funny. Nearly every one of them could double as DARE program exhibit for why kids shouldn\u2019t smoke weed. As much as I try to hang in there, I have to admit that figure skating is not my thing. I confess that every time the U.S. wins the gold, I\u2019m reminded how much I wish we would change our national anthem from the Star Spangled Banner<\/em> to America the Beautiful<\/em>. It is so beautiful and is a far superior song. Plus it has a much better message.<\/p>\n I confess that there are only 2 more weeks until the Daytona 500. Once a week I will get to channel my inner redneck. I can\u2019t wait.<\/p>\n I confess that the rest of the MMC is about the book Zealot<\/em> \u2013 if you don\u2019t want a piece of that, you should bail out now \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I confess that I read Reza Aslan\u2019s Zealot<\/em> this past week. I was honestly looking forward to reading it, but it was a complete disappointment. There\u2019s nothing new in the book. He just microwaved a few of the standard fringe historical-Jesus theories and patch-worked them together in a narrative form. Aslan is a really good writer \u2013 he apparently teaches creative writing \u2013 which makes it all the more tragic that he interprets scriptures like a fundamentalist, picking and choosing only the texts that support his thesis, while ignoring the myriad of texts that completely contradict it. Even more than that he ignores the major themes of Jesus\u2019s teaching, at one point saying that the gospels are just not reliable, then basing his thesis in a carefully selected set of texts from those same gospels. His overall thesis \u2013 Jesus was really a zealot who was plotting violent sedition \u2013 would probably seem extremely plausible if you have no idea that he\u2019s not playing fair with the texts and that he\u2019s doing a ton of revisionist history \u2013 which. let\u2019s face it, most readers won\u2019t. Unless you\u2019ve done some graduate level reading, you\u2019ll never know the book is full of misleading historical commentary, dubious interpretations, truncated quotes, tons of presumptions and assumptions that would never stand up to scholarly engagement. The whole time I was reading I just wanted to scream, \u201cJesus is hanging around with tax collectors and Roman sympathizers!\u201d (A zealot would never have done such a thing).<\/p>\n I confess that reading\u00a0Zealot<\/em>\u00a0as a scholarly theological work is akin to reading Dan Brown\u2019s novels as scholarly historical work. Zealot<\/em> is fantasy.\u00a0I think it\u2019s pretty telling that I couldn\u2019t find a single scholarly article on the ATLA database that engaged with the book. I confess that this critique might sound snobbish, but I don\u2019t mean it to be. It\u2019s just that I know how much work it takes to be able to hit with the pros when it comes to this specific arena of religious studies. I know I couldn\u2019t do it. It requires a massive amount of reading and expertise in everything from ancient near eastern culture and languages, to archaeological research and text critical studies \u2013 the kind of expertise that Aslan clearly doesn\u2019t have. Either Aslan doesn\u2019t know what he doesn\u2019t know, and he\u2019s naive; or he knows exactly what he\u2019s doing, and he\u2019s simply misleading people in order to make a splash and get rich (which he has done). My suspicion is that it\u2019s a little of both. Whether or not his credentials qualify him, he didn\u2019t do the work. That\u2019s why it bugs me that he defends himself as an expert. If he\u2019s an expert, he could still make the same case, but he\u2019d have to prove his work. He doesn\u2019t do that in Zealot.<\/em>\u00a0If you want to play ball, then play ball with the guys who will actually point out your shoddy scholarship. I haven\u2019t decided if I\u2019m going to write up something more extensive on the book. It\u2019s just internally incoherent and riddled with misleading interpretations that it seems silly to give it too much time.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I confess that today is week three of being back on my Sabbath routine. Feeling good about the results so far, and hoping to remain faithful to the discipline. I confess that I\u2019m pretty stoked to be able to catch Jimmy Fallon live on The Tonight Show a little more often as of Feb. 17th. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1118,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n