'Lightning rod' Aslan happy to engage Christians over 'Zealot'

In a recent interview, Fox News host Lauren Green spoke to Reza Aslan about his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. Green's focus on why Aslan, a Muslim, would write about Jesus created a stir on social (and traditional) media, bringing more attention to the book, which was already on The New York Times ' bestseller list. Zealot argues that Jesus was a Jewish revolutionary interested in overthrowing Roman rule in Palestine, not in establishing a celestial kingdom, and that he would not have understood the idea of being God incarnate. In an interview with , Aslan discussed the reactions to his book, his desire to reach a Christian audience, the difficulty of writing about ancient history and more.

This is a debate that's been raging in academia for centuries. Much of what I argue in the book has been argued by my predecessors and colleagues: John Dominic Crossan, Johann Maier, Marcus Borg, N.T. Wright. What an academic does is build upon and synthesise the work of his predecessors. To be perfectly frank, if you're a biblical scholar, you're not going to find much that's new in my book. What I've done is take this debate … and simply made it accessible to a non-scholarly audience.

Absolutely. Anyone who deals in ancient history is not playing with a full deck of cards. We have to figure out a way to fill in the holes that the historical evidence doesn't provide for us. All scholarship is based on filling in those holes with the best, most educated guess possible. I'm perfectly willing to defend my educated guesses. There's no such thing as objective history, which is why two scholars of the Bible can look at the same information and come up with absolutely opposing interpretations of it.

What excites me is that it has launched this public conversation about topics such as journalistic integrity and the role of religion in society. When you write about religion and politics for a living, you get used to this kind of response. I knew there were going to be people who would be upset at some of the conclusions in the book. I also understood some of those people would attack me, rather than the arguments in the book, because of my Muslim background. But I did not realise I was going to become such a lightning rod for these kinds of questions.