Reza Aslan Is Publishing World's Newest Star, Thanks to Fox News

It's a marketing triumph no book publicist or agent could have dreamt up: appear on Fox News, patiently endure a markedly confrontational line of questioning about one's religious affiliation, and wait for the whole thing to go viral.

But it's precisely what has happened for Reza Aslan, an Iranian-American scholar of religion, who appeared on a weekly Fox News webcast on Friday to promote Zealot, his controversial new biography of Jesus, only to be asked-repeatedly, for several minutes-why he, a Muslim, would be writing about Jesus.