On Reza Aslan
by Brian Watson
Recently, Reza Aslan has caused quite a stir by publishing a book on Jesus, titled Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan has been interviewed by several major media outlets. (It’s interesting that a man who writes an unorthodox view of Jesus is interviewed, while several conservative Christian authors are not.) I have not read the book and I haven’t paid attention to much of the hype, but what little I’ve seen has raised some questions about the man’s intellectual integrity.
Just this morning, I read “10 Questions for Reza Aslan” in Time. He says that his biography of Jesus does not use the New Testament as its primary source material. Then, he claims, “The New Testament is not a historical document. It was written by communities of faith many years after the events that they describe.” This assertion is left unchallenged.
To say that the New Testament is not historical is question begging. It’s an assertion backed up by no evidence or argumentation. The truth is that the New Testament documents (27 different histories or letters) are historical and claim to be so. The books of the New Testament were written by those who knew Jesus or those who had access to eyewitness testimony. Luke (the author of the Gospel that bears his name, as well as the book of Acts) begins his history of Jesus this way:
Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught. (Luke 1:1-4 ESV)
That sounds like an historical account to me. Now, you can claim that Luke was wrong about certain details, or that the whole Bible is a piece of fiction, but then you better have great evidence to prove those statements. In fact, Luke proves himself to be a great historian, with accurate knowledge of the Roman Empire. (For more on historical reliability of the Bible, see what I have written about the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection.)
One might also consider how John begin s the first epistle that bears his name:
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3 ESV)
The New Testament is a collection of historical documents that report what eyewitnesses have seen, heard, and even touched. This is history with a purpose, to be sure, but all historical writing is written for a purpose. And all historical writing is written from a certain bias. This is true whether it’s Reza Aslan, Paul, John, Luke, or Josephus.
The fact that that the New Testament books were written some 20-65 years after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is no bother when you understand that many accounts throughout history were written years after the events they describe. The number of manuscripts we have of the New Testament are far more than any other ancient historical documents. And they are far closer in time to the original writings. (For more details, again, see here.)
What we now of Jesus comes to us primarily through the New Testament. Other ancient writers, whether Christian, Jewish, or pagan, also report some facts about Jesus, but they are minimal. (For more information on non-Christian evidence, see my article on the resurrection.)
My guess, without reading the book, is that Aslan has constructed a Jesus who is no different than his contemporaries.
There’s another bit of evidence that Aslan might not be a man of integrity. He seems to have misrepresented his credentials during a recent interview with Fox News. I saw the interview, and while I am in now way defending the tactics of the interviewer, I don’t think Aslan came across very well, either. He kept repeating his credentials and his description of his degrees was misleading at best. (Here’s another article on the same subject.)
All of this reminds me of a very important point: in order to arrive at the truth, one must be true. To be an intellectual, one must possess certain virtues, namely honesty. But honesty isn’t a matter of intelligence or education. No, it’s a matter of morality, of integrity. If the author does not have some motivation to be honest, then there is no guarantee that his or her work reflects the truth.
There have been many books written about Jesus that are full of false statements. I imagine these books will continue to be written. There is nothing new under the sun. But let us all, including the media, be more critical of these books and the integrity of their authors’ work.
Thinking Christianly 
You make the following statement: “To say that the New Testament is not historical is question begging. It’s an assertion backed up by no evidence or argumentation. The truth is that the New Testament documents (27 different histories or letters) are historical and claim to be so. The books of the New Testament were written by those who knew Jesus or those who had access to eyewitness testimony.” Interestingly, your claims here not only lack evidence as well as much resembling argumentation but also fly in the face of over a century of biblical scholarship. To be sure, there are those who want to propagate the claim that the New Testament comprises a somewhat disjointed, but otherwise consistent, historical narrative, but as Aslan points out those claims are offered by believers trying to support and defend an orthodoxy.
Actual scholarly inquiry into the historicity of the New Testament documents has revealed both a great deal of inconsistency in the accounts on offer as well as compelling evidence that the original texts themselves, as much as can be determined at all, were authored decades after the events they claim to report, at the very least. Likewise, the attributions of the gospels in particular are highly questionable inasmuch as it has become increasingly clear over the years that those narratives were little more than different stories which had been compiled over time and attributed to a companion of Jesus as a matter of tradition as opposed to a matter of unbroken provenance. None of the preceding, however, accounts for the fact that our earliest extant copies of these texts originate several centuries after the events they claim to report, and even the copies subsequent to our oldest show clear signs of editing and alterations by scribes over the centuries for the purposes of ensuring their adherence to preferred interpretations at the times of their transcriptions. Nor does any of the preceding address even superficially the widely disputed attributions of a number of epistles purportedly authored by apostles such as the Letter to the Ephesians which has long since been determined by the greater majority of scholars not to have been written by Paul, to name only one.
Absolutely nothing I have just recounted is even slightly controversial in the area of biblical scholarship, and for you to state definitively that texts found in the New Testament were “written by those who knew Jesus or those who had access to eyewitness testimony” constitutes rank dishonesty of the highest order. The above information is so widely available that one need not even attend a single lecture to learn of its existence. In brief, the fact that you think to pass off your claims publicly without facing substantial challenges by those who dedicate their lives to these studies is baffling. I strongly recommend you examine the plank in your own eye before questioning the mote in Aslan’s, Dr. Watson. You may certainly be on safe ground in questioning Aslan’s representation based upon your personal faith tradition, but to attempt to conflate that with scholarly, historical inquiry is far beyond the pale, and to see you attempt it is an embarrassment.
John,
Thanks for interacting with me. Your generalized, unsupported comments regarding the historicity of the New Testament, if true, would prove to be devastating to the reliability of the New Testament and the veracity of the Christian faith. However, upon review, your claims simply are not true.
You say that there are those who want to propagate the claim that the NT comprises a historical narrative, and that Aslan says these claims are offered by believers trying to support ad defend an orthodoxy. That’s a fine statement to make. But there’s another truth that must be stated: those who claim the NT is not an historical narrative are biased by their unbelief and their desire to discredit Christianity. We all have biases. What counts is the evidence.
Next, you make a sweeping claim about “actual scholarly inquiry” has revealed inconsistency in the NT accounts. You assume that all biblical scholars over the last one hundred years are in agreement. They are not. There are many biblical scholars today who reject the wildly speculative “scholarship” of those who seek to discredit the NT.
Before I continue, it should be noted that critical biblical scholars of the last two centuries have been armed with little other than their anti-biblical bias and their imaginations. (It is mere coincidence that Aslan has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa?) There has been no evidence that the documents of the NT were forged or false attributed. This is simply false. Those who make such claims, such as Bart Ehrman, have been soundly refuted. The various “quests for the historical Jesus” have yielded divergent images of a Jesus who, strangely enough, seems to be made in the image of the scholars on those quests.
Truth is not determined by a “greater majority of scholars,” but by the evidence. There is no evidence of forgery. There is no evidence of misattribution. To say that there is such evidence, and to claim that this is not controversial in the area of biblical scholarship, is, at best, completely ignorant, and, at worst, a gross deception. In the study of history, it is often assumed that a document that claims to be historical is indeed historical unless evidence to the contrary can be found. We do not have contemporary documents that make claims contrary to those of the New Testament.
All NT scholars acknowledge that the NT documents were written decades after the life of Jesus. The Gospels were most likely written three to five decades after Jesus’ death and resurrection. This is not news and it is not problematic. In the ancient world, it was not uncommon for eyewitnesses to write of events years later. And that amount of time does not necessarily lead to error in reporting. You may wish to read Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.
That the four Gospels differ is not any surprise. The Gospels belong to the genre of biography (bioi, in Greek). One might more accurately say they are theological biographies. The purpose is clearly to teach a theological view of the life of Jesus, but that does not make the Gospels any less historical. All history is written for a purpose, after all. The four Gospel writers (two eyewitnesses: Matthew and John; two men with access to eyewitnesses: Mark, who knew Peter, and Luke, who knew Paul and also claims to have interviewed many eyewitnesses) shaped their biographies of Jesus to present certain themes. They focused on different details, often shaping the content of their biographies to highlight themes. This is all standard fare for biographies of that time period. To demand that ancient historians report history in a way that you would like history to be reported is unreasonable. (For more on historiography and how it relates to Jesus’ resurrection, see Michael Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus.)
The NT documents did not originate with the manuscripts of which you speak. Yes, complete manuscripts of the NT that we currently have date from the fourth century AD at earliest. This, too, is not news. If you compare the NT manuscripts to any ancient histories, you will see that the distance in time between the original writings and the earliest manuscripts we possess is far shorter with the NT. We have papyri from the second century, and manuscripts such as the Codex Sinaiticus come from the fourth century. Overall, we have thousands of manuscripts of the Greek NT. With other historians, either Jewish or Pagan, we have a handful of manuscripts, and they are dated some 900 or 1000 years after the original writings.
Claims by Ehrman that the NT manuscripts are riddled with errors and scribal editorial comments and so forth have been discredited. Evangelical scholars have long been very transparent about textual variants. You may wish to consult the works of the late Bruce Metzger. You may also wish to consult Daniel B. Wallace’s Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament. Wallace is one of the world’s foremost Greek and NT manuscript scholars.
Let us return to Aslan’s work. If he is such a great scholar, one with intellectual integrity, why is it that his work is riddled with errors and being panned by prominent NT scholars? I point you to the following reviews of his book:
Craig Evans: http://goo.gl/XzT2m2
Darrell Bock: http://goo.gl/Thabg8
Gary Manning: http://goo.gl/2dfM4p
John Dickson: http://goo.gl/KCtdLg
Joe Laconte: http://goo.gl/I8zhW2
Finally, your overblown rhetoric could easily be used against you. Your sweeping, generalized, baseless assertions constitute rank dishonesty of the highest order. The following sentence applies more accurately to you: “In brief, the fact that you think to pass off your claims publicly without facing substantial challenges by those who dedicate their lives to these studies is baffling.” Consult the works of Daniel Wallace, Richard Bauckham, Bruce Metzger, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, Craig Evans, D. A. Carson, and N. T. Wright (among many others) and you will find that your claims are simply not true. Claiming that my statements are “beyond the pale” and an “embarrassment” is simply an attempt to bully me. That will not do and your comments will not stand in the light of truth.
Let me finish with the words of Jesus.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.” (John 3:16-21)
He knew that people would reject the light of truth, because they would rather hide in the darkness of lies. Coming to truth means submitting to God, and that is something people like you don’t want to do. Come into the light, John.