A Muslim Historian Describes Jesus

[PoliticalChic]

Reza Aslan, and Iranian-American, born Muslim, converted to Christianity,...and returned to Islam.
Perhaps his personal history, his search for religious truth, colors his perception...but he provides scholarly research in his best-seller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

The picture he provides of Jesus is not one suggested by John 1:29, as 'the Lamb of God.'

Instead, he paints a picture of a revolutionary, a rebel, ready to lead the Jews against Rome!



Reza Aslan(Persian:رضا اصلان‎‎,IPA: [ˈɾezɒː æsˈlɒːn]; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American author, commentator and religious scholar. He has written two books on religion:No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of IslamandZealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Aslan was born into a Shia Muslim family.[32]He converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of 15,[5]and converted back toIslamthe summer before attending Harvard.[6]

On 22 October 2005,The Guardiancalled him "aShiaby persuasion".[33]

In a 2013 interview withWNYChostBrian Lehrer, Aslan said: "... I'm definitely aMuslimandSufismis the tradition within Islam that I most closely adhere to."[34]He also proclaims himself a 'genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.'[32]
Reza Aslan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



1. "....there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so.


2. But when combined with all we know about the tumultuous era in which Jesus lived—and thanks to the Romans, we know a great deal—.... help paint a picture of Jesus of Nazareth that may be more historically accurate than the one painted by the gospels.
Indeed, the Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise—a zealous revolutionary swept up, as all Jews of the era were, in the religious and political turmoil of first-century Palestine...

.....bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd cultivated by the early Christian community.


3. ...Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.

The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’ head as he writhed in pain—“King of the Jews”—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus’ crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e. treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed.

Nor did Jesus die alone. The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as “thieves” but that actually means “bandits” and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel."
"Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,"
byReza Aslan

 

[SassyIrishLass]

One problem, there is no and never has been a Palestine. I couldn't care less what some Moooslim has to say on Jesus

 

[Sunni Man]

One problem, there is no and never has been a Palestine. I couldn't care less what some Moooslim has to say on Jesus

Read and learn. ....

Timeline of the name "Palestine" - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Manonthestreet]

Not to mention He said his Kingdom was not of this world........oooops

 

[SassyIrishLass]

One problem, there is no and never has been a Palestine. I couldn't care less what some Moooslim has to say on Jesus

Read and learn. ....

Timeline of the name "Palestine" - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Name one president, king or whatever of Palestine, what was or is it's currency? Don't try and snow me, I know better. There has never been a country or state called Palestine. That's just fact. Palestinians are a bunch of nomads nobody wants

 

[PoliticalChic]

4. "Three rebels on a hill covered in crosses, each cross bearing the racked and bloodied body of a man who dared defy the will of Rome. That image alone should cast doubt upon the gospels’ portrayal of Jesus as a man of unconditional peace almost wholly insulated from the political upheavals of his time.

The notion that the leader of a popular messianic movement calling for the imposition of the “Kingdom of God”—a term that would have been understood by Jew and gentile alike as implying revolt against Rome—could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous.



5. Why would the gospel writers go to such lengths to temper the revolutionary nature of Jesus’ message and movement?

To answer this question we must first recognize that almost every gospel story written about the life and mission of Jesus of Nazareth was composed after the Jewish rebellion against Rome in 66 C.E. In that year, a band of Jewish rebels, spurred by their zeal for God, roused their fellow Jews in revolt. Miraculously, the rebels managed to liberate the Holy Land from the Roman occupation.

For four glorious years, the city of God was once again under Jewish control."
Aslan, Op. Cit.

 

[Blackrook]

Jesus told Pilate that his Kingdom was not of this world. He had the opportunity to tell people that he opposed the Roman occupation, but he never did. He told Jews to pay their taxes to the Roman Empire.

 

[Sunni Man]

Name one president, king or whatever of Palestine, what was or is it's currency? Don't try and snow me, I know better. There has never been a country or state called Palestine. That's just fact. Palestinians are a bunch of nomads nobody wants

 

[SassyIrishLass]

Name one president, king or whatever of Palestine, what was or is it's currency? Don't try and snow me, I know better. There has never been a country or state called Palestine. That's just fact. Palestinians are a bunch of nomads nobody wants

Note "under British rule"....save it

 

[Sunni Man]

Note "under British rule"....save it

The legal tender coins and paper currency have the name Palestine on them......with english, hebrew, and arabic, lettering.

Which indicates the area was known as Palestine by the general population.

Why are you denying reality? .....

 

[SassyIrishLass]

Note "under British rule"....save it

The legal tender coins and paper currency have the name Palestine on them......with english, hebrew, and arabic, lettering.

Which indicates the area was known as Palestine by the general population.

Why are you denying reality? .....

Why are you denying there has never been a nation or state called Palestine? There hasn't. It's just a fact. They a re a bunch of malcontents and should be exterminated

 

[BreezeWood]

.
Why perform miracles then die on a cross, wasn't the cross the test for the Jews whether J was their messiah ... and that's how it became chritianity instead.

Reza Aslan, and Iranian-American, born Muslim, converted to Christianity,...and returned to Islam.

away from christanity why didn't he then become a jew instead of back to islam ... something fishy about the whole scenario.

.

 

[PoliticalChic]

.
Why perform miracles then die on a cross, wasn't the cross the test for the Jews whether J was their messiah ... and that's how it became chritianity instead.

Reza Aslan, and Iranian-American, born Muslim, converted to Christianity,...and returned to Islam.

away from christanity why didn't he then become a jew instead of back to islam ... something fishy about the whole scenario.

.

No.
The test was for Jesus, to see if he could resist the temptation to save himself.
It is about sacrifice.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Aslan's thesis deals with this question.....if Jesus was a revolutionary, a rebel against Roman/secular rule....why would the writers of the Gospels...alter the nature of His message?

Here is his answer:

6."Then, in 70 C.E., the Romans returned. ....

.... the soldiers breached the city walls and unleashed an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount. A river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows, the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned.

So complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited. Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains.


7. The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged." "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,"
byReza Aslan


The devastation was so great that the elites could not allow another rebellion against Rome.
While the Jews made up a tenth of the Roman empire....they were no match for the Roman forces.

 

[BreezeWood]

.

No.
The test was for Jesus, to see if he could resist the temptation to save himself.
It is about sacrifice.

It is about sacrifice


Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ..... 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'


maybe that's why there's no record of the end ... J failed the test.

.

 

[PoliticalChic]

.

No.
The test was for Jesus, to see if he could resist the temptation to save himself.
It is about sacrifice.

It is about sacrifice


Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ..... 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'


maybe that's why there's no record of the end ... J failed the test.

.

That represents a conversation He is having with himself.

 

[BreezeWood]

.

No.
The test was for Jesus, to see if he could resist the temptation to save himself.
It is about sacrifice.

It is about sacrifice


Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani ..... 'My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?'


maybe that's why there's no record of the end ... J failed the test.

.

That represents a conversation He is having with himself.

.
That represents a conversation He is having with himself.

sure it does ...

.

 

[PoliticalChic]

8. While the Gospels were written in such a manner that the movement represented no threats to the military force, the Romans, it should be noted that there were far more than four Gospels.

The gospels included Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but also the Secret Gospel of James, of Mary Magdalene, of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Apocalypse of Peter, and a number of others.


a. The Gospel of Thomas. The opening lines of this gospel say that it contains "secret sayings" of Jesus, and that anyone who discovers their true meaning "will not taste death". The gospel then gives 114 of these sayings, most of them introduced by the words "Jesus said"…. the only surviving complete copy is a Coptic translation…. many scholars consider it to be the most important surviving non-biblical gospel.



b. At one point the Church reviewed all of those extant...and put its imprimatur on the four we call 'The Gospels.'

As a result of the number, and kinds, of gospels extant, several with a Gnostic bent, there was the very real danger of the young Christian church splintering into different religions. In the second century, the bishop of Lyon, Saint Irenaeus, wrote the five volume “Against Heresies,” (called “The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge”) designed to remove Gnostic beliefs out of the Christian religion, and to limit it to the four-fold Gospel canon. All the others were deemed heretical.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Aslan makes the case that the real Jesus was ready to lead a revolt against the Roman-Greek world, to establish God's kingdom, and that this made the Jewish leaders fearful of a powerful backlash that would eradicate the Jewish religion completely.


9. "The Christians, too, felt the need to distance themselves from the revolutionary zeal that had led to the sacking of Jerusalem, not only because it allowed the early church to ward off the wrath of a deeply vengeful Rome, but also because, with the Jewish religion having become pariah, the Romans had become the primary target of the church’s evangelism.

Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could accept, and in fact did accept three centuries later when the Roman emperor Flavius Theodosius (d. 395) made the itinerant Jewish preacher’s movement the official religion of the state, and what we now recognize as orthodox Christianity was born.


10. [Aslan's] book is an attempt to reclaim, as much as possible, the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity: the politically conscious Jewish revolutionary who, two thousand years ago, walked across the Galilean countryside, gathering followers for a messianic movement with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God but whose mission failed when, after a provocative entry into Jerusalem and a brazen attack on the Temple, he was arrested and executed by Rome for the crime of sedition.

It is also about how, in the aftermath of Jesus’ failure to establish God’s reign on earth, his followers reinterpreted not only Jesus’ mission and identity, but also the very nature and definition of the Jewish messiah."
"Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,"
byReza Aslan

 

[GiveMeATicketToWork]

Reza Aslan, and Iranian-American, born Muslim, converted to Christianity,...and returned to Islam.
Perhaps his personal history, his search for religious truth, colors his perception...but he provides scholarly research in his best-seller, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

The picture he provides of Jesus is not one suggested by John 1:29, as 'the Lamb of God.'

Instead, he paints a picture of a revolutionary, a rebel, ready to lead the Jews against Rome!



Reza Aslan(Persian:رضا اصلان‎‎,IPA: [ˈɾezɒː æsˈlɒːn]; born May 3, 1972) is an Iranian-American author, commentator and religious scholar. He has written two books on religion:No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of IslamandZealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth...

Well those Muslims are into violence...their religion says that men may beat their wives under some circumstances. Koran (the Muslim scripture book) 4:34:

Noble Qur'an translation
...As to those women on whose part you see ill-conduct...beat them (lightly, if it is useful)...

Yusuf Ali translation
...As to those women on whose part ye fear disloyalty and ill-conduct...beat them (lightly)...

The words in parenthesis are added into the text and are not part of the original text.