Aslan believes it’s all to conceal that Jesus was born out of wedlock. The virgin birth is only mentioned in two of the four gospels and Paul never writes about it. The virgin birth is a concoction to disguise that Jesus was born out of wedlock The passage in the Gospel of Luke where a 12-year-old Jesus is impressing the temple priests with his questions and knowledge is a fabrication, he says.

Jesus probably didn’t know Aramaic and knew only rudimentary Hebrew. Ninety-eight percent of Jews at the time of Jesus were illiterate, Aslan says. The reason Jesus was said to be born in Jerusalem was so it would follow Biblical texts that said the messiah would be born in Jerusalem. Which was such a backwater town that Nathanael asks in the Gospel of John: “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?” The hamlet was so unrecognized that it didn’t show up on any maps or any ancient Jewish source until the third century, Aslan says. The Bible makes it clear that Jesus grew up in Nazareth. Jesus was born in Nazareth, not Jerusalem These are some of the controversial conclusions that Aslan makes which others have made before him: 1. “Zealot” is one of many books in the past few decades that attempt to sever a historical Jesus from a Jesus of faith.

The counter punch from the right was about how heretical “Zealot” is to Christianity.īut as I said, this is not new territory. Liberals who loathe FOX News widely circulated the video as an example of what they said was the intolerance and ineptitude of FOX News. But in the era of the culture wars, that’s not as important as lampooning the other end of the political spectrum. These days it’s fairly common for TV journalists to be unprepared for an interview. The worst part of it was that Green appeared unprepared and didn’t seem to have read the book she was criticizing so strongly. From her first question (“You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?”) the interview was a mini-train wreck. That’s when FOX News’ Lauren Green interviewed Aslan.

Interestingly, the book was largely ignored by the mainstream media until The Interview. But “Zealot” has stirred up some anger because it challenges some of the basic beliefs of Christianity. “Zealot” hasn’t struck the cultural nerve that Dan Brown‘s “The DaVinci Code” did – with its conjecture that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, its outline of the church’s suppression of women and all of the conspiracy theory about The Catholic Church. But the best-selling book is an indication of the American public’s fascination with the “historical Jesus.” (Photo courtesy Random House) Despite all the controversy, Reza Aslan offers little or nothing new in his “Zealot” book.

Zealot by reza aslan summary