By now, you may have heard of the incident, quickly gone viral, in which a Fox News “on-air personality” raised questions about a revered if semi-mythical figure, with a combination of obliviousness and opacity and point-missing that set new standards even for Fox. I mean, of course, Brian Kilmeade’s inquisition the other morning about a new video of Bigfoot. “I’m looking at it and this could be Bigfoot,” Brian explained confidently, about a video in which a very, very distant brown figure might possibly be thought to be marching around like a man-ape in the British Columbia woods. “I’m almost convinced. Are you? And why don’t we ever zoom in?”

Meanwhile, there was, yes, also that other, more predictable incident in which Fox News’s Lauren Green, in an interview with Reza Aslan, wondered how he, as a Muslim, could have had what in the first-century Temple would have been called the chutzpah to write a scholarly book about Jesus. Aslan, to his credit, kept his patience and his equilibrium, and tried to remind Green that scholars generally try to avoid bias by consulting sources, examining texts, submitting to the rigors of critical inquiry, etc. She looked singularly unimpressed, as if he had been trying to sell her on the idea that Obamacare didn’t involve supplying government-made pillows with which to smother Grandmom.

Being attacked for insufficient Jesus-ness by a Fox News anchor is apparently (well worth keeping this in mind) a way to drive your book up to No. 1 on Amazon, where Aslan’s landed this week, before then landing, in turn, in our lap. “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” turns out to be a pugnaciously written, unduly self-assured, and, on the whole, extremely conventional view of the historical Jesus, already familiar to those who keep up with contemporary Jesus studies. Basically, Aslan’s work, though original in detail, echoes the conclusions of the writer and scholar John Dominic Crossan in its vision of a “peasant cynic” Jesus: a rabble-rouser, a political radical, and an extreme Jewish nationalist—a Zealot, who infuriated the Romans and got the horrible Roman punishment for insurrection. This Jesus ran a kind of family-cult synagogue in Jerusalem, which was passed on to his brother James, who then got mostly written out of the record after Paul’s more Roman-friendly Christianity took the stage.

As always in these things, the interpretation involves picking out some texts as core while dismissing others as late or interpolated, with the criterion for choosing between them seeming to be, more or less, whether stories float your boat rather than what truths can be shown to walk on water. If you privilege the radical, Zealot Jesus—the one who eats with prostitutes and dismisses kosher diets and rails against Caesar —you have a hard time explaining the unworldly, Sermon on the Mount Jesus, and a still harder time explaining the purely hieratic, apolitical non-human savior-from-heaven Jesus who emerges in Paul’s letters in the decades after Jesus’s death. If you like the messianic son-of-man Jesus, you have a hard time explaining what it was that riled up the Romans. If you go for the angry activist Yeshua who drove the poor money changers from the Temple (many of them no worse than the kinds of currency-exchange folks you see at airports), you have a hard time explaining how he emerged so quickly as Paul’s Christ, a figure so remote from politics or life itself—no personal stories with wise sayings—as to lead to the rational suspicion that Paul did not intend to indicate anyone of earthly existence at all.

In either case, you have a hard time explaining why such a memorable figure left so faint a footprint on the sands of his own time. Josephus, the great and sure-footed Jewish historian of the period, most likely never mentioned him at all. (A vexed question in ancient historiography is whether the one extended reference in Josephus to Jesus is a later interpolation or has a “residue” of original intent. If there is a residue, it is that of a wonder-worker, but not of a Zealot, a type Josephus mistrusted. There’s a second reference to that brother, James, but it’s disputed, too.)

“Jesus” may be a compound figure, to whom tales and truths of many kinds have been ascribed. It’s also perfectly possible, as I’ve suggested in the magazine, that the original figure, assuming there was one, actually was this varied, or nearly so: charismatic leaders of oppressed peoples tend to be plural in character to the point of self-contradiction. Was Malcolm X a violent radical nationalist or an embracing universalist? It depended on what moment and in what mood you caught him. The same is true even of Nelson Mandela. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine a historian two thousand years from now arguing that the real Mandela was a fierce, vindictive prophet, with the conciliatory one a much later overlay.

Aslan, to his credit, is candid about the truth that Jesus the wonder-worker and miracle-doer is more prominent in the Gospels than any other Jesus. And as a scholar, he seems, implicitly, to subscribe to the one rational argument about all miraculous events: in billions of years of the earth’s existence, there is not a single credible instance in which the laws of nature have been abrogated, but, in the sixty thousand years Homo sapiens have been around, there are innumerable instances in which people have made up stories about such abrogations to impress other people with the virtues of their favorite king or god.

Which returns us, as it should, to that interview. The odd thing about it is not the rage at the idea of a Muslim writing about Jesus, but the fact that there was no sense of embattlement. The utter incredulity, perhaps insisted on by the producer in Lauren Green’s earpiece, was offered in a tone of self-evident disbelief: Who could even imagine that a Muslim could write about Jesus? What was really striking about Green’s don’t-come-to-Jesus moment was its equable complacency—not fierce, argumentative anger, but a kind of bland, blank, bored congenial scorn.