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Book: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Quotes of Book: Zealot: The Life and Times of
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  1. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words "This is the messiah," aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion.
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  2. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity, one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the Jews practiced crucifixion; the punishment is mentioned numerous times in rabbinic sources. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer. The procedure of the crucifixion-how the victim was hanged-was left completely to the executioner. Some were nailed with their heads downward. Some had their private parts impaled. Some were hooded. Most were stripped naked. It was Rome that conventionalized crucifixion as a form of state punishment, creating a sense of uniformity in the process, particularly when it came to the nailing of the hands and feet to a crossbeam.
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  3. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Mark's focus is kept squarely on Jesus's ministry; he is uninterested either in Jesus's birth or, perhaps surprisingly, in Jesus's resurrection, as he writes nothing at all about either event.
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  4. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    The readers of Luke's gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened than in what it meant.
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  5. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Together, these three gospels-Mark, Matthew, and Luke-became known as the Synoptics {Greek for "viewed together"} because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and ministry of Jesus, one that is greatly at odds with the fourth gospel, John, which was likely written soon after the close of the first century, between 100 and 120 C.E.
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  6. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus's birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word "history." The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.
    book-quotehistory

  7. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Matthew and Luke also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection of Jesus's sayings that scholars have termed Q {German for Quelle, or "source"}. Although we no longer have any physical copies of this document, we can infer its contents by compiling those verses that Matthew and Luke share in common but that do not appear in Mark.
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  8. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    One would think that Jesus's admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything "Jesus-in-the-flesh" may or may not have said. In fact, Paul shows no interest at all in the historical Jesus. There is almost no trace of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his letters. With the exception of the crucifixion and the Last Supper, which he transforms from a narrative into a liturgical formula, Paul does not narrate a single event from Jesus's life.
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  9. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christian community.... Why then has James been almost wholly excised from the New Testament and his role in the early church displaced by Peter and Paul in the imaginations of most modern Christians?
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  10. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Matthew needs Jesus to come out of Egypt for the same reason he needs him to be born in Bethlehem: to fulfill the scattered prophecies left behind by his ancestors for him and his fellow Jews to decipher, to place Jesus in the footsteps of the kings and prophets who came before him, and, most of all, to answer the challenge made by Jesus's detractors that this simple peasant who died without fulfilling the single most important of the messianic prophecies-the restoration of Israel-was in fact the "anointed one.
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  11. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city, building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his crumbling mud-brick home at night. He would have witnessed for himself the rapidly expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor. He
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  12. Reza Aslan _ Zealot: The Life and Times of

    The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common sight in Jesus's time-so common, in fact, that it had become a kind of caricature among the Roman elite. In a farcical passage about just such a figure, the Greek philosopher Celsus imagines a Jewish holy man roaming the Galilean countryside, shouting to no one in particular: "I am God, or the servant of God, or a divine spirit. But I am coming, for the world is already in the throes of destruction. And you will soon see me coming with the power of heaven.
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