Aslan, R: Zealot

Produktbeschreibung

When you are told that the focus of a book is the "historical Jesus", it's easy to assume that the author is interested in substantiating Jesus as a historical personage so as to bolster the claims of religious Christianity.

Reza Aslan did a masterful job of presenting the historical context for the rise of Islam, (No god but God is a widely translated bestseller and an acknowledged contribution to historiography.) He is a scholar of religions and an excellent writer who can take a sprawling topic and render it sensibly and persuasively.

His argument boils down to this: The Jews of the first century had been consumed by the passion of holy war, of jihad, against Roman occupation, and Jesus was only amongst the last in a long line of messiahs, healers, rebel leaders, and self-proclaimed "King[s] of the Jews" who were executed. (He never uses the phrase "holy war" or jihad, of course, but the parallels are astonishing and unmistakable.) Jesus as a figure doesn¨t even appear much in the first third of the book, because Aslan is busy constructing a truly impressive context for Jewish rebellion under the harsh rule of Rome, and for Jewish aristocratic and theological co-option by the Romans to the point of collaboration. 

Autoreninfo

Reza Aslan ist Associate Professor of Creative Writing und Cooperating Faculty im Department of Religion an der University of California, Riverside. 1972 im Iran geboren, floh er nach der Revolution dort mit seiner Familie in die USA. Mit 15 wurde er evangelikaler Christ, kehrte später aber zum Islam zurück. Er studierte Religion in Santa Clara und Harvard und promovierte in Religionssoziologie an der University of California, Santa Barbara. Als Truman Capote Fellow an der University of Iowa absolvierte er den berühmten Writers' Workshop. Er publiziert in zahlreichen Medien.