I've just finished reading Reza Aslan's ZEALOT:THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JESUS OF NAZARETH, and I'd encourage others to read and react to it. In short, Aslan paints Jesus as an illiterate peasant whose death proved he was not the messiah. He believes that Paul fought a theological war with Peter, John, and James the brother of Jesus who was the "bishop of bishops" in the early Church and essentially ran the Jerusalem assembly..Of course, Paul preached a gospel of salvation by faith, James of adherence to the law and thus, Aslan supposes, of "works." Paul won in large measure because the Christians remaining in Jerusalem were wiped out with the rest of the population when Rome leveled the city in 70 AD. The crux (ignore the double entendre) of Aslan's argument comes when he asks why the apostles would not only preach the resurrection but stake their lives on it and due for it if the resurrection did not in fact happen. I've asked myself that exact q
The Great Dialogue