TOW #4: Zealot by Reza Aslan

Zealot endeavors to tell the true story of Jesus Christ, but even the cover is a lie:
it portrays Jesus as a white man even though he was an Arab Jew.

Religious scholar Reza Aslan has made quite the stir in recent months with his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.  As the title suggests, the book aims to tell the truest story of the somewhat-mysterious prophet possible, as it has been repeatedly obscured and changed over the past two thousand years.  Obviously, religion is a touchy subject.  While anyone would be capable of reading Zealot, only those who are deeply interested in religion, history, or both, and are receptive to reading a story about Jesus different from the concocted one presented nowadays would actually be able to absorb and respect the information in the book.  This TOW focuses on the introduction, as it is incredibly interesting for reasons explored below.
As the book is a biography that strives to be as accurate as possible, Aslan begins to use facts in the very introduction to tell readers that their journey to discover the real Jesus could be surprising.  He writes, "We now have access to an entire library of noncanonical scriptures written mostly in the second and third centuries that provides a vastly different perspective on the life of Jesus of Nazareth... discovered in Upper Egypt, near the town of Nag Hammadi, in 1945." (Alsan 5).  He sets the reader up to expect not a lot of speculation and guesswork, as in many books about religious figures from long ago, but cold hard facts put together to support historically-possible theories.  This makes him seem much more credible, someone who is much more sure of the picture they are painting.  At the end of the introduction, Aslan also makes a quick appeal to pathos.  He tells his readers, "The Jesus that is uncovered... may not be the Jesus we expect... but in the end, he is the only Jesus we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith." (Aslan 9).  In one way, it is to be expected that Aslan would bring a bit of emotion into such a topic; Jesus is a religious prophet, and religion always means feeling something.  Readers could become a bit miffed that nothing about faith was really mentioned in the introduction, but Aslan wisely acknowledges that faith and views about Jesus are tightly entwined.
Aslan focuses on the fact that the man most of us know as Jesus is essentially a myth and that there are many facets to His complicated story.  He conveys this message to readers very well, as he acknowledges the faith that is always involved when one thinks about what version of Jesus they believe to be true while still writing about the "real", historically accurate Jesus.