What friends they have in Jesuses

** As I'm about to read Reza Aslan's latest book, "Zealot," I go in armed with Harry T. Cook's latest essay in which he says:

Aslan may be right about a Jesus having been a zealous revolutionary. Crossan is almost surely right about a Jesus being, as he put it, a "Mediterranean Jewish peasant" who may have been at the same time an "itinerant sage." The liberation theology people may be right in saying that a Jesus was a socialist at heart. And I may be right in saying that the Jesus may be a composite of all of them.

I normally would not have looked into Aslan's book but for a positive review by BW, my atheist friend,  and the rotten treatment he got on Fox "news" by a twit who couldn't get off the subject of a Muslim writing a book about Jesus. His detailed explanation on MSNBC that it was his job as a scholar to write about it didn't faze her but gave him more credibility in my eyes as someone who was not entering into a merely partisan argument.

I don't doubt that someone (probably Paul of Tarsus) cobbled together a mishmash of myths and claims about several guys to form an actual religion out of one guy. It served to construct an empire that continues to this day. Again, the story (true or not) has power.

The New Atheists are, for the most part, illustrating that one needn't believe in fantasies to live a good and useful life. this is a hopeful sign that humanity is evolving out of the need for infantile parental figures to give meaning to this accident of human life.