Reza Aslan’s “Zealot” reaching the top of the best-seller list is a reminder that books on the historical Jesus have been popular for a very long time. In 1846, George Eliot translated “Life of Jesus, Critically Examined,” by David Friedrich Strauss, from German into English. Nearly 150 years later, Evelyn Toynton, writing about “Jesus: A Life” for the Book Review in 1992, said A. N. Wilson’s study “does not pretend to add much to the scholarship on the subject.” According to Toynton’s reading, Wilson, like Aslan, argued that Jesus “never saw himself as anything but a Jew or desired any following among the gentiles,” and “was crucified as a terrorist, not as a religious figure.”
The scholar John P. Meier has called the historical Jesus the “great perennial question” in Western religion. Martin Goodman, reviewing Meier’s own addition to the field, “A Marginal Jew,” in the Book Review in 1991, thought its demythologizing went too far. Goodman said the book posited “six ways in which Jesus was marginal in the society of his day. All six seem to me specious.”
...