If God works all things together for my good, then why hasn't everything seemed that great? That's a question we end up asking after someone flippantly quotes Romans 8:28. I appreciate the encouragement, but I wonder if something is lost in translation.

Is it really good that my parents got divorced? Is it good that my childhood friend was sexually abused? Is it good that my buddy lost his job? Is it good that my brother's girlfriend died in a car wreck? Is it really good that all this bad stuff is happening?

When I was younger, I didn't know what this verse meant. But I knew it didn't mean everything was good.

After the Fox News interview brought first class media hype to a religion scholar's book about Jesus, Reza Aslan's 'Zealot' hit number one on Amazon's book sales. I found his methodology for creating the Jesus of history to have fundamental flaws. So I've explained the top 10 historical mistakes Reza Aslan makes in his case for making Jesus a political revolutionary. Check out the video on YouTube: Reza Aslan Zealot book review by Bible scholar Paul Penley. 

My apologies for the late night recording of my critiques. I think the tiredness and frustration with such poor scholarship getting hyped shows through in the final minutes of the video blog. It certainly appears that Reza's personal story of an Iranian American muslim turned evangelical Christian and then turned muslim again has warranted the hype around this book more than anything new or substantive in his portrait of Jesus.