- Tim Hale on Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/28: “A young woman spoke at church on Sunday. She was departing on a mission to France. She spoke about how shy she was as a child, barely able to say hello to anyone. And now here she is, moving ahead with faith in the Lord’s work, and in a foreign tongue. It reminded me of my mission and how terrified I was to teach my first lesson in the field. I now consider teaching, in all its capacities, one of the most joyful, fulfilling opportunities to serve. We can change. We can change.” Dec 29, 22:42
- on Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/28: “No church meetings here due to a blizzard. All my children are still in town for the holidays. Life is good.” Dec 29, 21:56
- on Was Jesus Married? Where Was He Born? The Restored Gospel and the Quest for the Historical Jesus: “I for one am very ignorant of the things you’ve discussed and appreciate the fact you’re prodding us to do some solid thinking and analyzing for ourselves. In today’s world in which people seem both ignorant and incapable of analytical thinking beyond a few lines on line (ignorance of basic geography and energy economics come to mind) its good to be challenged to think and analyze and educate ourselves some” Dec 29, 21:37
- on Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/28: “A young man of priest age played a viola with his younger sister on the piano, O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Very beautiful, very uplifting. Then the conducting bishop’s counselor delivered his talk on many blessings and serving the Lord, and mentioned the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — it was wholly unnecessary and sort of ruined the meeting for me. Some would say that is my fault because I should see the good regardless, but somehow I really wished he didn’t bring politics into our sacrament meeting. But it reminds me of the statement from a general conference back in the 1960s that we need better music in our sacrament meetings, and more of it, and we also need better speaking in our sacrament meetings, but less of it. Based on where I live in VERY pro-Trump America, I have to agree.” Dec 29, 14:16
- 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 Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 12/28: “Here are my reactions to recent Church meetings (12/21 & 12/28): Our chapel was decorated for Christmas—like many or even most others. But I began to think a little about why and how. The chapel is a kind of structure, that we can change by decorations to fit a particular purpose. But most of the time we don’t. I suppose limiting the decorations to a few significant days each year makes those days stand out more. So the question is one of what days do we decorate and why? One performer sang “O Holy Night”, and the first verse was in French. I thought this was a welcome change, one that not only emphasized the song’s origin, but also gave it a slightly different feel. I love the song — I think I cry every time I hear it. One speaker pointed out that there’s no reason why we can’t extend the Christmas season — many cultures do (the whole 12 days of Christmas goes from Christmas Day to Three Kings Day). We can do this if we want — it just requires planning out how to extend the holiday. During Sunday School, in a discussion of the names of Christ, one class member drew the line at ‘cheap’, saying “When has God ever been cheap?” I loved the thought. It points out that too often we tend to think in terms of money. God isn’t cheap just like he isn’t ’expensive’, because for God its not about money! ” Dec 28, 20:53
- 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
