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997e773
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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 , than in what it . It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying messa..
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history
truth
biblical-scholarship
scholarship
fact
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Reza Aslan |
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c805ec8
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Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God's essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he means the Quran) in the presence of the Beloved who wrote it?
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Reza Aslan |
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69384de
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Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.
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Reza Aslan |
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8a36cc7
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A Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek were traveling to a distant land when they began arguing over how to spend the single coin they possessed among themselves. All four craved food, but the Persian wanted to spend the coin on angur; the Turk, on uzum; the Arab, on inab; and the Greek, on stafil. The argument became heated as each man insisted on having what he desired. A linguist passing by overheard their quarrel. "Give the coin to me,..
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Reza Aslan |
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b6ea64e
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As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God. There are, of course, many paths to the summit-some better than others. But because every path eventually leads to the same destination, which path one takes is irrelevant.
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Reza Aslan |
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d416cf1
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Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person's spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.
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religion
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Reza Aslan |
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6dbb712
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Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.
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Reza Aslan |
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de70e17
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The choice between James's vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul's vision of a Roman religion that divorced itself from Jewish provincialism and required nothing for salvation save belief in Christ, was not a difficult one for the second and third generations of Jesus's followers to make. Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul's creation has utt..
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jesus
religion
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Reza Aslan |
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9d6e73d
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One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations for God. If there is only one God, then there may be only one truth, and that can easily lead to bloody conflicts of irreconcilable absolutisms.
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Reza Aslan |
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36fbc4a
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However, Saudi Arabia quickly discovered what the rest of the world would soon learn. Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease..
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Reza Aslan |
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5bf1b67
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The first-century Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.
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Reza Aslan |
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490636d
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As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe--for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but to become one with God. I recognize that the knowledge of good and evil that the God of Genesis so feared humans might attain begins with the knowledge that good and evil are not metaphysical things but moral choices. I root my moral choices n..
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Reza Aslan |
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1aa126e
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Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus's death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian anti-Semitism.
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Reza Aslan |
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e905399
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It took many years to cleanse Arabia of its "false idols." It will take many more to cleanse Islam of its new false idols--bigotry and fanaticism--worshipped by those who have replaced Muhammad's original vision of tolerance and unity with their own ideals of hatred and discord. But the cleansing is inevitable, and the tide of reform cannot be stopped. The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it."
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Reza Aslan |
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b3f1b53
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The memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authority of the Temple priesthood in Jerusalem, the radical Jewish nationalist who challenged the Roman occupation and lost, has been almost completely lost to history. That is a shame. Because the one thing any comprehensive study of the historical J..
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Reza Aslan |
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4b7ba40
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In the Ummah, there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E., when the so-called "verse of hijab" suddenly descended upon the community. That verse, however, was addressed not to women in general, but exclusively to Muhammad's wives:"
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Reza Aslan |
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84bb30f
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Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans--"everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved" (Romans 10:13)--to what Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew: "Not everyone who says to me 'Lord Lord' shall enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 7:21)."
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Reza Aslan |
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e168922
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The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.
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religion
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Reza Aslan |
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2a115c9
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The overwhelming consensus is that the traditions contained within the epistle can confidently be traced to James the Just. That would make James's epistle arguably one of the most important books in the New Testament. Because one sure way of uncovering what Jesus may have believed is to determine what his brother James believed. The first thing to note about James's epistle is its passionate concern with the plight of the poor. This, in it..
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Reza Aslan |
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96aba60
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no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.
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Reza Aslan |
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d52926f
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Both gospels employ the term "Son of God" exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description."
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Reza Aslan |
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9cbaa62
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It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: "today I have begotten you" (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his "first-born son" (Exodus 4:22). But in every case, Son of God is meant as a title, not a description. Paul's view of Jesus as the literal son of God is without precedence in second Temple Judaism."
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Reza Aslan |
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421769a
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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.
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Reza Aslan |
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047e6de
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But perhaps the most important innovation in the doctrine of jihad was its outright prohibition of all but strictly defensive wars. "Fight in the way of God those who fight you," the Quran says, "but do not begin hostilities; God does not like the aggressor" (2:190). Elsewhere the Quran is more explicit: "Permission to fight is given only to those who have been oppressed ... who have been driven from their homes for saying, 'God is our Lord..
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Reza Aslan |
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0b5a608
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Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.
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Reza Aslan |
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a58b723
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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.
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Reza Aslan |
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3ba3b4f
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No one speaks for God--not even the prophets (who speak about God).
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Reza Aslan |
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17f6556
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That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love and compassion in one believer, hatred and violence in another; why two people can approach the same scripture at the same time and come away with two radically opposing interpretations of it. Indeed, most of the religious conflicts that continue t..
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Reza Aslan |
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8fa1779
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Today, Medina is simultaneously the archetype of Islamic democracy and the impetus for Islamic militancy. Islamic Modernists like the Egyptian writer and political philosopher Ali Abd ar-Raziq (d. 1966) pointed to Muhammad's community in Medina as proof that Islam advocated the separation of religious and temporal power, while Muslim extremists in Afghanistan and Iran have used the same community to fashion various models of Islamic theocra..
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Reza Aslan |
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9cd16ae
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There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword" (Matthew 10:34 | Luke 12:51)."
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Reza Aslan |
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49ed86d
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Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism.
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Reza Aslan |
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9bd6520
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But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor's religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
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Reza Aslan |
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86c8572
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More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculously born to a young maiden, and the expectation of a final cosmic battle that would take place at the end of time between the angelic forces of good and the demonic forces of evil.
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Reza Aslan |
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d6e3976
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So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as "that plague." Among the citizenry, the word "cross" (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to "go hang yourself."
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Reza Aslan |
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f957485
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These abiding words of the Beatitudes are, more than anything else, a promise of impending deliverance from subservience and foreign rule. They predict a radically new world order wherein the meek inherit the earth, the sick are healed, the weak become strong, the hungry are fed, and the poor are made rich. In the Kingdom of God, wealth will be redistributed and debts canceled. "The first shall be last and the last shall be first"
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Reza Aslan |
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70f8d45
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Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely through the slow and steady building of personal relationships that one discovers the fundamental truth that all people everywhere have the same dreams and aspirations, that all people struggle with the same fears and anxieties.
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Reza Aslan |
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dff8eed
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The gospels present Pilate as a righteous yet weak-willed man so overcome with doubt about putting Jesus of Nazareth to death that he does everything in his power to save his life, finally washing his hands of the entire episode when the Jews demand his blood. That is pure fiction. What Pilate was best known for was his extreme depravity, his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion to the Jewish natio..
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Reza Aslan |
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f8867f1
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There is, however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a human being, not divine. Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth, not in heaven.)
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Reza Aslan |
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b71a3f7
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So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jerusalem to immediately label Jesus as lestes. A bandit. A zealot.
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Reza Aslan |
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e9c24e9
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All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all, reformers who redefine and reinterpret the existing beliefs and practices of their communities, providing fresh sets of symbols and metaphors with which succeeding generations can describe the nature of reality.
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Reza Aslan |
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41f49fe
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This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply "the god."
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Reza Aslan |
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6d97009
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How could the Law of Retribution function properly when one party in a dispute was so wealthy and so powerful as to be virtually untouchable?
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Reza Aslan |
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199f1af
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He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his own accord because Jesus told him to).
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Reza Aslan |
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cea9d9e
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It is astonishing that centuries of biblical scholarship have miscast these words as an appeal by Jesus to put aside "the things of this world"--taxes and tributes--and focus one's heart instead on the only things that matter: worship and obedience to God. Such an interpretation perfectly accommodates the perception of Jesus as a detached, celestial spirit wholly unconcerned with material matters, a curious assertion about a man who not onl..
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Reza Aslan |