Reza Aslan Eliminates the danger of Islamic Violence

Parents, stop worrying about whether your kids are going to join a cult or extremist ideology.  It doesn't matter.   It only matters that you raised them well.  

After all, Nazism is just an ideology, and like all ideologies, what you make of it depends entirely on what you bring to it.  Those who are naturally violent, like Adolf Hitler, bring genocide and attacks on Germany's neighbors.  But gentle, kind, and loving converts to Nazism, do as you know make a name for themselves by feeding the poor, curing the sick, and holding the hands of the terminally-ill poor, around the world.  

Voldemortism is also just a magical orientation, and like all such orientations, depends no more and no less than on what you bring to it.  If you are incurably gothic, you will probably get nothing out of it but death to muggles.  But many other followers of Voldemort become outstanding and kindly citizens, known for their public-spiritedness.  This is why "Death-Eaters" are known for their charity work on six continents, and are fast putting Kiwanas and Lions Club out of business.  

Security Risks?

Satanism, too, is just one of many choices off the shelf of modern religions, no better or worse than any other, which will in no way affect your kids, should they choose to hang their hats on that particular sharpened peg.  

Quarkerism, too, is just a denomination.  Like all denominations, what you make of it depends no more and no less than on what you bring to it.  If you're a violence person, then you will join the world-wide Quaker Jihad, and blow up people on a weekly basis on every continent except Antarctica.  (Since Quakerism just happened to spread by men on camels carrying swords, and there are no camels in Antarctica.)

Thank you, Professor Aslan, for explaining to your intellectual inferiors why they, too, can stop worrying, and learn to love the jihad.  We now realize, as Shakespeare put it, that "nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

And I think you're a poor logician with a shaky grasp on the relationship between ideas and actions.  But no doubt in your own mind, you're brilliant.  

Aslan and Ehrman make asses of themselves

 

In his work debunking the supposed parallel between Apollonius and Jesus, Eusebius says that while Apollonius may have been a genuine philosopher of sorts, if anyone takes Philostratus' work The Life of Apollonius of Tyana seriously as historical writing, he mistakes an ass for a lion: 

 

"We shall have an ass instead concealed in a lion's skin; and we shall detect in him a sophist in the truest sense, cadging for alms among the cities, and a wizard, if there ever was one, instead of a philosopher."

 

Perhaps this was a common metaphor of the day.  Or maybe these very words of Eusebius' are the origin of the plot of C. S. Lewis' prize-winning finale to the Chronicles of Narnia, in which an evil ape dresses up a gentle donkey named Puzzle in a lion's skin.  Dressed up to look like Aslan, the noble lion, Puzzle is paraded before the crowd of Narnians in the twilight (when he is hard to see clearly) by a cynical, often-drunk ape and his Calormene masters who wish to enslave Narnia. 

 

Ironically, in Zealot, Reza Aslan falls for this original trick of the fake Aslan, and compares Jesus (the lion) to an ass (a fitting description of Apollonius of Tyana, as I began to show in my last post.) 

Bart Ehrman does the same thing, in egregious and phony detail (again, see last post), in his recent book How Jesus Became God.

And so Eusebius was wiser than the present crop of NT scholars -- not just Erhman and Aslan, but the whole Jesus Seminar, Richard Carrier, Paula Fredriksen, the lot.  C. S. Lewis had their number  sixty years ago. All these scholars who are enamored of Apollonius are making asses of themselves, all over again. Because Eusebius was on the money: no one who looks at Apollonius in the light of day, can honestly make the mistake these "scholars" want us to all make.

 

So are they honestly "puzzled," or trying to fool people?  I am beginning to suspect the latter.  How could Bart Ehrman not know how stretched many of his analogies are?   Why else would he take his "lion" out in the darkness, by obscuring so many details, covering others up, as he does?  Are these sorts of scholars playing the role of honestly fooled Narnians, or the more pernicious role of the Calormenes or the drunk ape?  (Or perhaps the overly-clever cat, Ginger?)

But how fitting, that Reza Aslan should be caught mistaking his Aslans, while Eusebius called him out for such foolishness, 1700 years ago.   

Was Jesus Illiterate?

In Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Muslim scholar Reza Aslan argues that Jesus was illiterate: 

"It is estimated that nearly 97% of the Jewish peasantry could neither read nor write . . . Whatever languages Jesus may have spoken, there is no reason to think he could read or write in any of them, not even Aramaic.   Luke's (accounts) . . . are fabulous concoctions of the evangelist's own devising. Jesus would not have had access to the kind of formal education necessary to make Luke's account even remotely credible." (34)

In addition, Aslan claims that Jesus belonged to "the lowest class of peasants" of the time, "just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave."  He adds that there were "no schools in Nazareth" for peasant children, and surmises that Jesus' only education would have been in his trade.





To this I responded earlier, on this site, on Amazon, and in an article for Radix Magazine.  Here's the version from this site. 




Here are thirteen reasons why Aslan's argument fails, and it is far more reasonable to believe that Jesus was fully literate in one or more languages:






(1) The claim that only 3% of Jews at the time were illiterate has been disputed. 

(2) It is illegitimate to dismiss specific historical reports, such as that Jesus could read, based on broad demographic generalizations, such as that most people at the time could not read, therefore any given person could not read.  There are several such passages in the gospels, our earliest sources for the life of Jesus.  If any one of them is accurate, then Jesus must have been literate. 

(3) Aslan's main argument  (A) against Jesus' literacy goes like this: (a) X belonged to Category N.  (b) People in N usually possessed quality Q.  (c) Since X belonged to N, X probably also possessed Q. 




How much confidence can we place in such an argument?  When there are contrary historical reports, almost none. 


If we accepted arguments of type A, the claim that I was born in Seattle would have to be dismissed, since only one maybe ten thousand human beings are born in that city.  (A far smaller percentage than 3%.)  So would the claim that William Carey taught himself ancient languages while cobbling shoes, then introduced modern agriculture, printing, botany and other science to India, transforming that nation.  After all, no other cobbler did all that, so the prior probability against the story would seem to be vast, "not even remotely credible," in Aslan's words, but not 30 to 1, 300 billion to one. 

For an example from India where we have actual figures, less than 1% of Indian women could read before the early 20th Century.  Does that render biographies of female reformer Pandita Ramabai, which say she was educated in Hindu texts, incredible?

(4) Learning Greek letters is easy. 

(5) Aramaic does not appear difficult, either.  (I say that, having studied far more complex writing systems.) 

(6) Jesus was ambitious.  An ambitious young man who makes his living from the Hebrew Scriptures, would have strong motivation to learn to read them, or to read in general.  (And of course a young man who had gained mastery in the Hebrew texts, would be far more likely to make a big splash in Jewish religious society.) 

(7) His parents may also have wanted him to learn to read.  Luke reports that there were educated people in the family.  Surely it was more common for people with educated relatives, to learn to read, than for people without such relatives. 

(8) Other famous people come from humble backgrounds, and expended a great deal of energy in acquiring an education.  For example, almost no one read books in the town where Abraham Lincoln acquired his education.   Yet no one doubts reports that he could read, and indeed write with great mastery. 

(9) Jesus would have been able to speak Aramaic, and probably Greek.  This would give him a great advantage over those of us who study Greek without ever hearing it spoken. 

(10) Greek sounds the way it is spelled, unlike English.  Perhaps the same is true of Aramaic, as it seems to be of most languages more than English.  (This is true of all the languages I have studied enough to know that have alphabets or syllabaries, including Dai, French, German, Koine Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.) 

(11) The article Aslan appeared to be relying upon to show that few people in Jesus' day could read, admitted that more men than women learned to read.  Jesus was, of course, male. 

(12) It also admitted that more people who left the village life also learned to read. 


(13)  In addition to being ambitious in a field that required literacy, Jesus was also smart, perhaps the smartest person who even lived.  (M. Scott Peck)  That of course makes it almost inevitable that he would have learned to read and write, even aside from the positive evidence in the NT that he did (of which I have only touched the fringes.)   





All these factors combined make it probable a priori that an ambitious and brilliant male who moved from the country to the city and sought to reform Jewish tradition, and may have had well-educated relatives, would in the process of preparing to minister, have taken the elementary and fairly easy precaution of learning how to read. 




That is speaking strictly of prior probability.  But as we have seen, sane historians recognize that prior probability must usually yield to actual reports of what happened.  And even aside from a few direct reports of Jesus reading, his whole complex and brilliant interaction with the Old Testament Scriptures, which so inspired his followers and ultimately changed history, is not easily understood on the hypothesis that Jesus could not read the Jewish Scriptures for himself. 




Therefore, the claim that Jesus was illiterate, is vanishingly improbable, and can only be held against the weight of both reason and evidence. 

Aslan Gets Bulverized!

Many of the early negative reviews of Reza Aslan's runaway bestseller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, were embarrassing to those of us who think the real problem with Aslan's portrait of Jesus is that he gets his facts wrong:

Aslan Stumbles.

(Update: I've just posted an abridged version of this review on Amazon.com, after finishing the rest of the book.) 

Reza Aslan's instant best-seller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, runs on two levels simultaneously.  On the popular level, and in the chapters themselves, the book is an easy-reading popular reenactment of the Jesus story.  (Well, Aslan's one-sided spin on it, that is.  More on that later.)  Meanwhile, in the back of the book, Aslan carries on a dialogue with various scholars. 

This is necessary, because Zealot purports to be a serious and informed argument for a particular interpretation of Jesus.  Aslan tells us several times how long and seriously he has studied religion, over "two decades of rigorous academic work," seeming to imply that his academic work was mainly of the historical Jesus.  (It was not.)  Aslan's claim is that Jesus was in some sense a "zealot."  Aslan believes that Jesus' appeal was chiefly political and we should read the gospels through that grid. 

Aslan begins by setting the life of Jesus in the context of the rise and fall of Second Temple Judaism within the devouring and unforgiving Roman Empire.  He describes the town of Nazareth, where Jesus was raised, the nearby city of Sepphoris, where he thinks Jesus worked, and rebellions and pogroms that swirled through Galilee and Judea and ultimately led to the violent exile of the Jewish people from their native land.  Much of the territory he covers parallels that covered by John Crossan in The Historical Jesus, though he draws from other scholars as well. 

Zealot is not the worst book I have read on the historical Jesus.  The popular-level story is well-written, and contains numerous interesting historical insights.  (Such as, for instance, that despite his criticism of the Pharisees, some Pharisees seemed to get on well with Jesus -- Earl Palmer has made a similar point.)  Aslan's dialogue in the back of the book does show that the man has read quite a few scholars, most of them respectable. 

But at the half-way point, already it is clear that this Aslan is not up to the job of taking on this particular lion. 

First ten quibbles, then two vital misunderstandings.  (Well, some of the "quibbles" are really quite major, too, and seriously undermine Aslan's argument along with his credibility.  But the last two are the real kickers.)