Zealot (Reza Aslan, 2013)

I recently finished Zealot and I have to say that Reza Aslan has yet to write a bad book. His first book, No god but God is an indispensable introduction to Islam. Zealot isn't a direct Christian parallel (mainly due to an overall higher familiarity in the United States), but rather an exploration of who Jesus of Nazareth was or may have been (a.k.a. "the historical Jesus"). Although general audiences are the targeted readership, Aslan's scholarship is impeccable (even our resident Old Testament scholar here at the seminary approves). The narrative is also clever. This isn't a straight-up retelling of the life of Jesus. In fact, the first section devotes all of a single paragraph to his birth, ministry, and death. This is done to advance the chronology to the time when the bulk of the scriptural material was written, following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Not to be missed is the third section, where the Church of Paul and the Church of James are compared and one really gets a sense of just how looming a figure Paul was not just in the earliest Church but also in the creation of the very scriptural canon that Christianity rests upon.