Eat the forbidden fruit

Eating human brains, burying one’s face in dead people’s ashes and publicly deriding the president of the United States as a ‘piece of shit’ are not among the activities usually associated with serious religious historians. But Reza Aslan is something else. An American academic born in Iran, brought up as a Muslim, converted to Jesus by the Jesuits and back to Islam through his own free will, he came to prominence following an interview on Fox TV to promote his book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (2013). He was repeatedly asked how being a Muslim qualified him to write about Jesus, to which he responded by listing in pushful, indignant tones all his academic credentials.

He claimed to be a ‘historian’ (which strictly he isn’t); a ‘professor of religion’ (he is actually a professor of creative writing) and a ‘PhD in the history of religions’ (when actually he is a doctor of sociology).