Jesus Under the Microscope - NYTimes.com Reza Aslan's "Zealot" reaching the top of the best-seller list is a reminder that books on the historical Jesus have been popular for a very long time. In 1846, George Eliot translated "Life of Jesus, Critically Examined," by David Friedrich Strauss, from German into English. Nearly 150 years later, Evelyn Toynton, writing about "Jesus: A Life" for the Book Review in 1992, said A. N. Wilson's study "does not pretend to add much to the scholarship on the subject." According to Toynton's reading, Wilson, like Aslan, argued that Jesus "never saw himself as anything but a Jew or desired any following among the gentiles," and "was crucified as a terrorist, not as a religious figure." The scholar John P. Meier has called the historical Jesus the "great perennial question" in Western religion. Martin Goodman, reviewing Meier's own addition to the field, "A Marginal Jew," in the Book Review in 1991, thought its demythologizing went too far. Goodman said the book posited "six ways in which Jesus was marginal in the society of his day. All six seem to me specious. The Siren's Call Ann Rule, who reviews "Manson" this week, has written more than two dozen true-crime books, but boldface names rarely appear in them. In a 1999 chat on CNN.com, Rule wrote: "I don't like high-profile cases." But she felt her passion for other cases at a young age. In an interview on Seattle public television in 2010, Rule talked about her childhood aspirations: "I knew one thing I didn't want to do was be a writer. In fourth grade, I thought, "That's too hard." But I was always fascinated - from the time I was 5, probably - if I heard sirens in the night, I wanted to go, and my folks explained that really wasn't very practical. "I wanted to call it "Daisy's Valentine," but everyone at the publishing house assured me that it was an awful title. It was the editor's boyfriend that came up with "B.B." I didn't like it because I didn't think most of the behavior in the book was so bad; it's more confused and ridiculous." - Mary Gaitskill in an interview with The Slant, about the 25th anniversary of her debut story collection, "Bad Behavior."