Its first sentence reads, “When I was fifteen years old, I found Jesus,” and continues, “For a kid raised in a motley family of lukewarm Muslims and exuberant atheists, this was truly the greatest story every told.” Those curious about Aslan’s personal religious trajectory, and why a Muslim might have devoted himself to the copious amounts of research synthesized so well in Zealot, will get satisfaction from the Author’s Note with which the book begins. The book, at this writing, sits atop the NY Times nonfiction bestseller list and is near that same position on the list. Following the interchange, Random House rushed another 50,000 copies of Zealot into print. Green has had her defenders on the religious right, but by and large, she has taken a drubbing from the media for hosting a discussion about Zealot that managed to steer clear of anything pertaining to its contents.

So why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”įor a fraction of a second, Aslan seems nonplussed before responding that he, too, wants “to be clear” and that he is “a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament, and fluency in biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also just happens to be a Muslim.” The interchange continues in this vein, with Green questioning Aslan’s motives and Aslan restating both his unimpeachable academic credentials and the fact that they dovetail with a lifelong interest in the subject matter. The Fox interchange, which immediately went viral online, begins with Lauren Green, Fox’s religion correspondent, challenging Aslan: “I want to be clear, you are a Muslim. There is, to start with, the Fox News kind of response, which, inflammatory and uninformed as it is, can still generate enough faux controversy to blunt attention to what might be deemed genuinely controversial about Aslan’s book. The responses, to date, to Reza Aslan’s concise, suggestive study- Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth-have been of two kinds. Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth by Reza Aslan. I am a secular Jew who can’t but welcome Zealot ‘s conclusion that Christianity pulled a role reversal on Jesus, and made this failed revolutionary Jew into someone who eschewed his people and its traditions in favor of Roman power.

Zealot jesus of nazareth review