Stealing from Peter and Paul

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American "Scholar." He has written the above book and spoken about it in-length in several interviews. Although I have not read the book, his interview on CSPAN2 BookTV, in his own estimation, was an apt and comprehensive explanation of his beliefs about religion. Although he does have a Ph.D. in Sociology and numerous other academic degrees, I think it necessary to place suspectful quotations around the word scholar above. The reason is this: His discussion of Christianity's origins and early history is so weak and inaccurate, one must wonder where he derives his conclusions from. Certainly, no honest and coherent reading of the New Testament.

A first-year student at the most backward Bible College should be able refute his assertions. Professing to  be wise, becoming fools I suppose...

Essentially, Aslan's thesis is this: Jesus never claimed to be God, His Disciples never thought him to be God, instead it was an invention of Paul. The Epistles of Peter and James, as well as the Gospel of John, Aslan asserts, were written much later than the apostolic age by anonymous authors. How he concludes this is really strange because these books self-identify who the authors are by name and they are who we think them to be: John, Peter, and James. There is some debate on James that is legit...I think it is James, Jesus's younger half-brother. His moral authority is unquestioned and the evidence strongly points to him.

Skeptics have to come to terms with the prospect and likelihood that these prominent leaders of the early Church and other adherents, would make false claims, out-and-out fabrications. Not mere misunderstandings but deliberate fraud. For a faith system that takes sin and the Commandments seriously, i.e. false witness, these allegations are highly suspect. There is no reason to believe that Peter, James, and John did not write the books named after them when the internal attestation states this, and the historical evidence lines-up clearly and coherently.

In Aslan's estimation, the Apostle Paul was a religious renegade, at odds with the other leaders of the early Church. Aslan states that Paul had to be summoned to Jerusalem several times, like a bad kid to the Principal's office, to be chastised and corrected. The Books of Acts and elsewhere clearly show that these meetings were called to work out some thorny issues, but never do we get the idea that Paul is out-of-line. More often, it is the case of Paul needing to correct the cultural and theological baggage of apostate Judaism. Peter pens in his Epistle that Paul does write of some things hard to understand, which is a very remarkable statement. If the revisionists are correct, the odds are strongly against this writer, presuming to be Peter, would write such a balanced statement that affirms Paul's writings as Scripture, but at the same time, admitting that they were difficult to understand. The balance has the ring of authenticity.

Contrary-wise, Aslan steals from both Peter and Paul and deposits the credit in his own bank account.

Paul himself often admits to getting to a impasse point where things like figuring out God's predestination and human free will in terms of choices, are a deep paradox. That hardly sounds like a man inventing his own take on religious matters. I had a math professor in college who admitted in class that the higher we go in math, we all get to point where we don't understand anymore. My upper limit was PreCalculus at the time. Does this statement of the math professor make him suspect on math concepts more easily understood? No, just the opposite I was impressed by the humility of the math professor and it made me trust him all the more because he admitted to his own limits as an authority.

I am generally impressed by CSPAN 2 BookTV. I couldn't figure out if the interviewer just didn't know better or did and was giving Aslan a free pass to utter his nonsense. It made me fear that if one of our best mediums for the exchange of important ideas like CSPAN 2 BookTV was so off-course, what does that say about the general understanding in our culture of life and death matters? Early Christians showed a willingness to die for who and what they believed in without resorting to violence to compel belief. Unlike the origins of Islam that began at the tip of the sword. That is the historical record for the first three centuries of Christianity and these facts are beyond dispute. Whatever happened at the hands of Imperial Rome three centuries later is clearly full of misdeeds and coercion, but three hundred years is a lot of time for truth claims to die if not backed-up by the sword. Early Christianity instead prospered in the acid test of persecution.

Not everyone is called to the academic life and scholarship. The Apostle Paul, who had both a Hebrew name of Saul and a Greek name of Paul, was uniquely called as both a Jew and a Roman citizen, to bring the Good News to the world, using his full gifting as first-class intellect and thinker, deeply conversant with both theological and philosophical truth.  Aslan, I am sorry to say, really suffers in comparison. He is a light-weight at best and a liar at worst.  A zealot by definition is:

a person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.

Aslan is a zealot of the worst sort. One who willfully misrepresents the views of others to buttress his own mistaken beliefs. A tyrant of pluralism, the god of the age, which believes in nothing but one's own gas. Pray that the God of Truth would unblind him as such happened to Paul so long ago on his way to Damascus to destroy what was called The Way.

Acts 26:14

We all fell down, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, 'Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It is useless for you to fight against my will.'