- tutime on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Funny you mention NT Wright, since his scholarship goes against everything Aslan claims. But just in case one thinks it’s only Ehrman who has issues with “Zealot” “Aslan demonstrates on about every third page that he is not conversant with recent literature on Second Temple Judaism. . . his appeals to first-century politics and religion relative to Jesus are superficial or misguided more often than not . . . Without exaggeration, problems like this surface on about every third page. I’ve only listed ten.” https://historicaljesusresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-usually-happy-fellow-reviews-aslans.html “At the same time, I have some serious reservations about Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, and I suspect that most professional biblical scholars will share some of them. First, the book contains some outright glitches, things a professional scholar would be unlikely to say. Aslan suggests there were “countless” revolutionary prophets and would-be messiahs in Jesus’ day. Several did appear, but “countless” is a bit much. Aslan assumes near-universal illiteracy in Jesus’ society, an issue that remains unsettled and hotly contested among specialists. At one point Aslan says it would seem “unthinkable” for an adult Jewish man not to marry. He does mention celibate Jews like the Essenes, but he seems unaware that women were simply scarce in the ancient world. Lots of low-status men lacked the opportunity to marry. Aslan assumes Jesus lived and worked in Sepphoris, a significant city near Nazareth. This is possible, but we lack evidence to confirm it.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/reza-aslan-on-jesus_b_3679466” Dec 29, 11:06
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “As a follow-up, the Archko Volume appeared in LDS homes and firesides in the mid-century through about the 1980’s, despite having been debunked as a total falsehood in the 1880s. If you or your parents have it, it’s nothing more than fan fiction on the bible, deceptively produced as ‘real’ and debunked.” Dec 29, 10:31
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Tutine, Major scholars such as Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, and Larry Hurtado do not challenge Ehrman’s competence or evidence, but rather his interpretations, particularly the degree of skepticism he brings to historical reconstruction. No scholar in this space goes unscathed, and I just wanted to point out that while this is Ehrman’s lane and he is admired, his own works also carry legitimate critiques. So, Ehrman knows a little something about the mud he slings. When one points a finger, three fingers point back. It’s funny that Ehrlman uses the ten-penny word “picayune” to describe his quibbles with Zealot. He could have just said, “hey, I’m nit-picking on Aslan, my highlights were “petty” or “worthless” (synonyms), but that wouldn’t have the same mud-slinging effect. A fancy word that many would assume means something much more sinister works better for his purposes. It’s an especially helpful technique if he wants to quantify the book (1/2, 1/3) as error-riddles the way he did. Also, he counted “questions” and “highlights” which are NOT the same things as “contradictions” or “errors”. This Yale man is being specific with his words, and tricky with his math. Aslan is explicit that he is packaging history, and repeatedly stresses throughout the book that historical reconstructions are provisional and subject to revision. He notes that “history is not about certainty; it is about probability,” and emphasizes that every generation reassesses the past using new tools, sources, and questions. He admits and welcomes changes based on scholarship, and challenges us to separate scholarly, triangulated evidence from faith and myth. These disclaimers place Zealot squarely within mainstream historical Jesus scholarship. Disagreement about facts would therefore reflect interpretive judgment. I’m not sure that protecting Aslan is a hill I’m willing to die on, but the statements I made above about the historical Jesus are pretty standard in historical conversations. Aslan’s book is an engaging and accessible way to ingest this information, having been on the NYT bestsellers list starting in 2013, and remaining there for some time. Whichever scholars we lean into, most (including Aslan and Ehrlman) agree on the following: *Jesus was probably born in Nazereth, not Bethlehem, but we can’t prove it. *Luke 2’s census setup was historically implausible (at least in the way Luke narrates it), and likely served a literary/theological function only. *Jesus and his family were likely illiterate. We can’t prove it one way or another, but illiteracy was the norm. Being literate in Galilee would have been rare. If he had some literacy, he likely wasn’t scribal-level-literate. We do not have any writings from him, everything in the NT was recorded by OTHERS. No one ever claims that he wrote the first drafts, either. Even him ‘writing’ in the sand when a woman was accused of adultery, is cited by both Aslan and Ehrlman as 1) a later addition to the text and 2) not evidence of literacy. Also, confounding the adults as a boy also does not prove literacy. *It’s highly unlikely that an expensive full hand-written Torah scroll existed in the little rural township of Nazareth. Scripture would have been sung, spoken, or occasionally accessed. There is currently no evidence of a synagogue or scribal school in the vicinity of the rural city of Nazareth. *Tektons were working class laborers paid by the day or the job. They included artisans, but referred to builders too. They hauled rubble, dug foundations and ditches, lifted and carried and did basic work in quarries, built walls, streets with rubble-stones masoned together, and other such heavy-lifting manual construction-level jobs. They could also lay mosaics on floors, but wouldn’t have been sculptors or other high-level artists. Essentially, construction hands. (My ward will tell you that he would have been a highly skilled artist and carpenter, using advanced math and divine geometry, and probably functioned more as a businessman- like a contractor. Eye roll.)” Dec 29, 10:18
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “I don’t agree with Bart Ehrman on many of his conclusions about historical reliability, but I do respect that he at least gets the facts usually right, even if his interpretation is wrong or badly framed. But here is his take on “Zealot” “Some readers of the blog have objected to my (repeatedly, I’ll grant) pointing out that Aslan is not an expert. Now I’ll try to show why that is both obvious and unfortunate. There are mistakes scattered throughout the book. I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 of the pages in my copy have bright yellow large question marks on them, where (when highlighting) I found factual errors, misstatements, dubious claims, inconsistencies of logic, and so on . . . here are some mistaken historical statements. Some may strike you as picayune, but some of them matter. And there are a lot of them; one wonders why they’re there at all. In each case I’ll cite his claim and then explain the problem.” https://ehrmanblog.org/aslans-zealot-historical-mistakes/” Dec 28, 17:34
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Zealot deserves a fair reading, not a caricature. Reza Aslan explicitly grounds his argument in major historical-Jesus scholarship, citing foundational works such as Jesus and Judaism and The Historical Figure of Jesus—texts that anchor modern consensus about Jesus’s Jewish context under Roman rule. The charge that every page is historically inaccurate is simply false; the real debate is about interpretation and emphasis, not basic competence. Aslan’s contribution is translating complex scholarship for general readers, which inevitably “rocks boats” among specialists but does not invalidate the work. It is telling that respected voices such as Dan Witherspoon have recommended it, and that Dale Martin (Yale University) has described it as a serious and plausible portrait of Jesus, even if not definitive. Universities including Yale University, Georgetown University, and University of Chicago have hosted Aslan for lectures and discussions (hardly the reception accorded to unserious or wholly unreliable work). Critiquing Zealot is fair; dismissing it outright while implying its readers “haven’t read scholarship” (when many have) is not.” Dec 28, 16:10
- on A Review: Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies: “Jonathan, it’s an important area to explore. There are some truly weird things that we believe, for sure, but often there is more context than we know about to those things.” Dec 27, 19:53
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: ““Zealot” has factual errors on nearly every page, is full of dubious assertions, and is not taken seriously by most scholars. Anyone recommending it as a useful, informative book needs to read a lot more widely in NT studies.” Dec 27, 17:20
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Stephen C., you should read Reza Aslan’s “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”. He was likely born in Nazareth. Bethlehem was a contextualizing and symbolic, not literal story. The Romans didn’t have crazy censuses like that (they were much more efficient), and while there are records of censuses taking place, there are no records of a census at that time. He was likely illiterate. Nazareth wasn’t on most maps. It had one cistern, no raoads, no schools, no library, no synagogue, no Torah, and wasn’t on most maps. Only 300-1000 people lived there. A 1-3% literacy rate is a gracious over-estimate. Likely completely illiterate. He wasn’t a rich contractor (as my ward likes to say), a wealthy carpenter or a skilled Mason. No, he was a day laborer, a tekton. His peers would have sloughed stone or rubble used to build or rebuild conquered cities, tediously full in mosaics, or the like for Hellenistic McMansions of the Roman overlords, the nouveau riche Sadducees or Hellenistic Jews working as Pharisees. I’m not sure how the Davidic connection was documented or preserved over a thousand years with an illiterate, war-torn population w/ no genealogy records, no libraries, church records, etc. that’s like proving connection to William of Orange today, but without the above-mentioned records. It could be an oral tradition, or a cultural one, but certainly not a traceable one.” Dec 27, 16:34
- on A Review: Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies: “This is a topic I wish we spent more time on. Sometimes we have a subconscious sense that we believe some uniquely weird thing, while “real” Christians all believe something else – when the reality is that there’s a range of beliefs even within Protestantism, and LDS teachings fit comfortably in that spectrum. We certainly do have some unique beliefs, but we sometimes have a hard time picking them out.” Dec 27, 14:42
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “Those are all very interesting additional insights and data that I wasn’t aware of. Thank you!” Dec 27, 13:30
