Jewish Review of Books adds, in a must-read takedown of the whole book:
His claim regarding his extensive endnotes is also plainly false, since there is not a single footnote or conventional endnote to be found anywhere in Zealot. (…)
[H]is doctorate was not, as he indignantly told the hapless Green, in “the history of religions.” Rather, he wrote an exceedingly brief sociological study of “Global Jihadism as a Transnational Movement,” at UC Santa Barbara.
Speaking on CNN in the wake of his Fox interview, Aslan ruefully observed, “There’s nothing more embarrassing than an academic having to trot out his credentials. I mean, you really come off as a jerk.” Actually, there is something significantly more embarrassing, and that is when the academic trots out a long list of exaggerated claims and inflated credentials.
Perhaps it is Aslan’s general fondness for breathless, often reckless, exaggeration that explains his problems with the basic digits and facts about his own work and life.
Such hyperbole alas pervades Zealot. Depicting the religious mood of first-century Palestine early on in the book, Aslan asserts that there were “countless messianic pretenders” among the Jews (there were no more than an eminently countable half-dozen).
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(Don’t miss the final paragraphs…)
