Discussing Zealot without Zealotry

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You may have seen, over the weekend, an exceedingly squirm-worthy video in which a Fox News correspondent grills religious historian and scholar Reza Aslan about why he’s written a book about Jesus despite being Muslim (completely ignoring his credentials, not to mention the fact that Jesus is a holy figure in Islam).

The Los Angeles Review of Books will be discussing Aslan’s book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, without the dishonest right-wing Islamophobia, including “a symposium on Zealot, with pieces by Andrei Codrescu, Kevin Hart, and Philip Maciak and a discussion with Reza Aslan.”

The first bit of coverage is this “reflection and endorsement by Scott Korb,” who has also written a book about Jesus (sort of), and who examines why it’s still so important to us to excavate and inspect facts about the “historical Jesus.”


Lauren O'Neal is an MFA student at San Francisco State University. Her writing has appeared in publications like Slate, The New Inquiry, and The Hairpin. You can follow her on Twitter at @laureneoneal. More from this author →