This topic contains 8 replies, has 6 voices, and was last updated by 
Wade 1 year, 3 months ago.
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Here is an interview with Reza Aslan, the author of Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth with Terry Gross of Fresh Air. He is best known for his book on Islam called No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam.
He talks about his conversion and reconversion and interest in the historical Jesus. This is the audio.
If you want to read the transcript here is another link.
Richard, thanks for posting that. It was very interesting. I subscribe to the belief that all religion is just stories to help people relate to and have language for the idea of a transcendence. And then after a while, people start to believe the stories as true when they were really just originally used as a vehicle to communicate an idea. The fundamentalist and evangelicals just take it to the extreme with book and passage worship. I think that if one wants to experience the transcendence then one is better off first stripping away all the stories that people have made up and going the way of the mystic. Most people, though, like the crutch of the stories. But then they start to believe the stories and then it all becomes about the stories.
AnonymousYES, yes. The development of the gospel formula is a product of western thinking, especially Greek and then later western modern thinking. Booya!! But then we didn’t just discover this did we. The bible really comes out of the transitional time or think space between the age of mythology and modernity.
Great interview. Thanks Richard. I was pleased to be able to listen to it even though it is on NPR… we in Canada didn’t used to be able to listen to NPR here. His thoughts are remarkably similar to John P. Meier’s “A Marginal Jew”.
After listening to this interview I have spent the day with an overwhelming sense of relief. I’m sitting with this sense of relief. Thanks.
AnonymousI listened to him on NPR and I appreciate the research he has done. I had NO idea there was such a drastic difference between the Biblical Jesus and the historical Jesus.
The thing about religious people’s tendency to take Biblical stories literally is kind of ironic when Jesus spoke in parables much of the time to his audiences. And obviously those were not meant to be taken literally. Must be the Western mind-set that insists on literalism.
I’m alarmed but I guess I’m not surprised that Aslan’s name is being dragged through the mud by people questioning his credentials and qualifications and motives. The man touched a nerve and is getting kick back. It’s an embarrassment to intelligence.
AnonymousI’m reading his Zealot book right now and so far it’s really good.
I think I’ll have to go find these books.He’s been doing what I was doing, only much more thoroughly.
Wade.
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