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“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”

The new book from Reza Aslan

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the “Kingdom of God.” The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured, and executed as a state criminal.

Two decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God.

Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived: first century Palestine, an age awash in apocalyptic fervor. Scores of Jewish prophets, preachers, and would-be messiahs traipse through the Holy Land, bearing messages from God. This is the age of zealotry-a fervent nationalism that made resistance to the Roman occupation a sacred duty incumbent on all Jews. And few figures better exemplified this principle than the charismatic Galilean who defied both the imperial authorities and their allies in the Jewish religious hierarchy.

Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan explores this diverse and turbulent age and, in doing so, challenges the conventional portraits of Jesus of Nazareth. Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction: a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves with swords; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity a secret; and ultimately, the seditious “King of the Jews” whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his brief lifetime. Aslan explores the reasons why the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he grapples with the riddle of how Jesus understood himself, the mystery that is at the heart of all subsequent claims about his divinity.

Zealot questions what we thought we knew about Jesus of Nazareth-even as it affirms the radical and transformative nature of his life and mission. The result is a thought-provoking, elegantly written biography with the pulse of a fast-paced novel: a singularly brilliant portrait of a man, a time, and the birth of a religion.

  Aslan’s previous book, No God but God, is the only biography that gives a bamanced view of Mohamed. That book not only talks abut seventh century Arabia, the book shows how tendrils of that origin underlay so much of modern middle eastern politics.

Now Aslan, a Muslim who was once an evangelical Christian, has applied the same sort of open minded analysis to Jesus.  The book puts Jesus into the context of his time … with Israel oppressed by Rome and the Pharisees preaching peaceful resistance. Alsan also offers Christians a chance to see how their religion, as opposed to Jesus, represents the result of Paul’s heresy .. an effort to recreate Jesus as an Greco-Roman deity, preaching a religion that could and would become the official religion of the culture that destroyed the Jewish Temple.

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