When Scholarly Skepticism Encounters Jesus Christ

I've been reading and writing about historical Jesus books for more than 30 years. Every now and then a volume or project comes along that catches the imagination of the public, sells well, and generates much discussion. Think of the Jesus Seminar or The DaVinci Code. Works like these have the same features: they present a "fresh" take on Jesus, tell you the Gospels cannot be trusted, appeal to what certain scholars say about the Gospels, pick and choose from the data they contain, and then tell us the Jesus of history was either a prophet (a dime a dozen), a miracle worker (a dime a dozen in the ancient world), someone whose goal was to overturn Rome (a goal that failed), or some combination. The disciples, faced with the dilemma of failed hope, went cosmic and created a resurrected Jesus (an idea with no precedent). Then they convinced the world it was so with the now-created Christ Jesus.

Reza Aslan and those like him claim the Christ of the church is a very different figure than the Jesus of history. The really creative theological work came later from his disciples, they say. These creative disciples were even willing to die for the fabricated rescuing of this lost hope. It's a great storyline for a culture that often doesn't want to hear about unique religious claims, but it's hardly a credible story to explain the origins of the Christian faith and the history tied to Jesus. Read more