A very few decades ago, an author by the name of Immanuel Velikovsky was pilloried by the scientific community for his popular book Worlds in Collision. And most of the scientists who commented on the volume loudly proclaimed that NO, they had not read the book nor would they even bother to read such unmitigated rubbish.
How could they know it was rubbish without reading it?
Years after the “Velikovsky Affair” had ended with the scientists declaring that they had “behaved poorly” one might have thought lessons had been learned… well, somewhere at least.
Dr. Reza Aslan’s new book, Zealot, attempts to examine the historical Jesus and expound on his personal insights into the matter.
Billy Hallowell, of the Blaze, wrote a critique on the book and included what he termed “responses” from Christian authors and theologians.
Uniformly, the Christian scholars scoff at the author for rehashing all the standard Islamic interpretations of the Bible, or for resurrecting Albert Schweitzer’s Historical Jesus. They claim he has not brought anything new to the table and most complain that he is not, strictly speaking, an historian.
What these scholars also uniformly proclaim is that none of them have actually read the book they are bashing but feel they can bash it anyway because of what they have heard other people saying about the book, or what they got off the blurb, or what one of their friends condensed from some television interview.
In other words, theologians have proven that – in truth – they are no different from scientists.
They, too, can condemn a heresy before they even hear it.
Imagine what progress we’ll make tomorrow.
Conversations with the Almighty 