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Robert Spencer in PJ Lifestyle: 5 Falsehoods in Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Sep 2, 2013 11:27 am By Robert Spencer

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In PJ Lifestyle today I show that the Iran apologist and creative writing professor lies about more than his credentials.

Reza Aslan’s notorious interview with Lauren Green on Fox has made him the toast of the liberal media, and his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth a massive bestseller. There’s just one problem: the book is lousy. It’s full of all of the empty portent of a bad B-movie screenplay (think Ben Hur as directed by Ed Wood), decades-old (and often discredited) scholarship breathlessly presented as brand-new discovery, and outright falsehoods foisted onto the unsuspecting reader, as Aslan manipulates facts to usher the reader to his predetermined conclusion.

Aslan arrogantly waved his credentials in Green’s face, and the media has eagerly taken up this particular cudgel for him: how dare Green question the prodigious scholar, the multi-degreed eminence, the dispassionate Muslim teller of truths about Christianity that are unpalatable to the racist, bigoted, Bible-thumping Islamophobes on Fox?

Matthew J. Franck, writing in First Things, noted that Aslan actually lied about his credentials to Green: he told her, “I am an expert with a Ph.D. in the history of religions”¦I am a professor of religions, including the New Testament–that’s what I do for a living, actually”¦To be clear, I want to emphasize one more time, I am a historian, I am a Ph.D. in the history of religions.” But he is not actually a Ph.D. in the “history of religions” at all; in reality, his Ph.D. is in sociology, and his dissertation was not on the New Testament at all, but on “Global Jihadism: a transnational social movement.”

Less often noted, however, is an even greater problem with Aslan’s obsessive citing of his credentials: degrees, particularly in this era of the politically correct stranglehold on academia, are no guarantee of knowledge, wisdom, or truth. Even if everything he had said to Green about his degrees had been true, it would confer on his book no presumption of accuracy or truth. There are plenty of fools with degrees, and plenty of geniuses without them. Aslan, from the looks of Zealot, is among the former — or at least he is hoping that his readers are. Here are five of this master scholar’s most egregious false statements:

1. Aslan refers numerous times throughout his book to Jesus living in “first-century Palestine.”

He has defended this usage in interviews by claiming that that was the Roman name for the area during Jesus” time. But in fact, Jesus lived not in first-century Palestine, but in first-century Judea, a place that no one called “Palestine.” The Romans renamed it “Palestine” after emptying the area of Jews after the Bar Kokhba Revolt in 135 A.D. Aslan’s usage is an anachronism, and given his venomous opposition to the State of Israel, perhaps a politically motivated one at that.

2. Aslan says that Luke, whom he derides as “Paul’s sycophant” and accuses of “a deliberate, if ahistorical, attempt to elevate his mentor’s status in the founding of the church,” for all that still never referred to Paul as an apostle.

But actually the Acts of the Apostles, which Aslan acknowledges was written by the same author as the Gospel of Luke, refers to “the apostles Barnabas and Paul” (14:14). Aslan claims to have studied the New Testament for over twenty years, but doesn’t seem to know basic facts about what’s in it.

3. Aslan claims that the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D. was deliberating over whether Jesus was “God incarnate” or “just a man — perfect man, perhaps, but a man nonetheless.”

It looks as if Aslan has been attending the Dan Brown school of oversimplification and distortion about Nicaea. But Brown is a fiction writer, and Aslan is supposed to be a historian.

In fact, the losing party at Nicaea, Arius of Alexandria, didn’t teach anything close to the idea that Jesus was “just a man.” On the contrary, he taught that Jesus as the Son of God was the first creation of God the Father, and that all other created things — the sun, the moon, the stars — were created through the Son. Hardly, in other words, just an ordinary fellow.

There is more.

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