imageEven Che Guevara, a proven ideological monster, started looking good next to this Jesus, to speak only about their looks. Che still looks good on his youth poster, but Jesus, who didn’t photograph so well on the shroud of Turin, doesn’t even look human when Aslan’s done with him.

–– Andrei Codrescu,writing in the Los
Angeles Review of Books,
importantly reprinted
just yesterday in Salon, arguing that Reza Aslan’s
“Zealot” paints Jesus as a Nazarene Che Guevara
(Hat tip to John Klotz)

For context, you should read the full embracing paragraph:

clip_image001. . . This carefully strategic Jesus of “history” is born of Aslan’s own pruning and sifting of the meager “historical evidence.” Jesus the Zealot emerges as little more than a collection of bullet points for Aslan’s arguments against the “love Jesus.” (Produced, incidentally, by the same “historical evidence.”) Zealot certainly took away my appetite to revisit Jesus Christ Superstar. I had to stay home and study my Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and all the other dreary horrors of the “revolutionary” horde that bored the piss out of my childhood. Even Che Guevara, a proven ideological monster, started looking good next to this Jesus, to speak only about their looks. Che still looks good on his youth poster, but Jesus, who didn’t photograph so well on the shroud of Turin, doesn’t even look human when Aslan’s done with him.

Actually, you should read the entire almost-long-form article.

Recall, I mentioned the book recently: Fox News Propels Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus to Number One (the video embedded in that posting has since been removed from YouTube at the request of Fox News).