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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
3660059	The principal task of the messiah, who was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, was to rebuild David's kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah at the time of the Roman occupation was tantamount to declaring war on Rome.			Reza Aslan
5c87d79	The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and to what degree. The sick, the lame, the leper, the "demon-possessed," menstruating women, those with bodily discharges, those who had recently given birth--none of these were permitted to enter the Temple and take part in the rituals unless firs..		priesthood	Reza Aslan
732c35a	Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to serve any foreign master--to serve any human master at all--and an uncompromising devotion to the sovereignty of God.			Reza Aslan
491febe	Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.		muhammad	Reza Aslan
213a0e4	pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.		pluralism religion	Reza Aslan
a77fdaf	As a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolving language, frozen forever in time			Reza Aslan
f02b8b3	In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain's divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial cont..			Reza Aslan
5cd6773	It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy. England continues to maintain a national church whose religious head is also the country's sovereign and whose bishops serve in the upper house of Parliament. India was, until recently, governed by partisans of an elitist theology of Hindu Awakening (Hind..			Reza Aslan
8fa8005	The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is "What do these stories mean?"			Reza Aslan
9cd13c8	Perhaps rather than concerning ourselves with trying to form a relationship with God, we should instead become fully aware of the relationship that already exists.		spirituality-vs-religion	Reza Aslan
b53a389	They fully bloomed in the pages of the Bible and the Quran, where the Sumerian word ilu became transliterated as Elohim in Hebrew and Allah in Arabic.			Reza Aslan
74bde46	There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.			Reza Aslan
f034001	God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus," the Quran says (42:13)."			Reza Aslan
28061aa	In fact, the term "holy war" originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. "Holy war" was not a term used by Muslim conquerors, and it is in no way a proper definition of the word jihad. There are a host of words in Arabic that can be definitively translated as "war"; jihad is not one of them. The word jihad literally mea..			Reza Aslan
9249694	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			Reza Aslan
357ebea	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." --			Reza Aslan
d07d939	The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn't one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is nonsense. All criminals sentenced to execution received a titulus so that everyone know the crime for which they were being punished and thus be deterred from taking part in similar activity. That the wording on Jesus's titulus was likely genuine..		pontius-pilate titulus	Reza Aslan
22323ca	Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.			Reza Aslan
ddc240e	Unlike their heathen neighbors, the Jews do not have a multiplicity of temples scattered across the land. There is only one cultic center, one unique source for the divine presence, one singular place and no other where a Jew can commune with the living God. Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state. The very term "theocracy" was coined specifically to describe Jerusalem. "Some people have entrusted the supreme political powers..			Reza Aslan
0f7fddf	Obviously James did not himself write the epistle; he was, like his brother Jesus and most of the apostles, an illiterate peasant with no formal education.			Reza Aslan
edb042f	Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound by the confines of the Temple and the Jewish religion, the Hellenist preachers began to gradually shed Jesus's message of its nationalistic concerns, transforming it into a universal calling that would be more appealing to those living in a Graeco-Roman milieu. In doing so, th..			Reza Aslan
95353fa	It is difficult to place Jesus of Nazareth squarely within any of the known religiopolitical movements of his time. He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion ("I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel"; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism ("Go and make disciples of all nations"; Matthew 28:19); sometimes calling for unconditional peace ("Blessed are the peacemakers for the..			Reza Aslan
7e7f9aa	Prophets such as Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former glory, are in fact making veiled criticisms of their current king and the present order, which the prophets imply have fallen short of the Davidic ideal.			Reza Aslan
eb630bd	Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and far better paid. Galilee especially abounded with charismatic fantasts claiming to channel the divine for a nominal fee. Yet from the perspective of the Galileans, what set Jesus apart from his fellow exorcists and healers is that he se..		miracles	Reza Aslan
680b4b6	How one in the modern world views Jesus's miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates raged within the early church over who Jesus was--a rabbi? the messiah? God incarnate?--there was never any debate, either among his followers or his detractors, about his role as an exorcist and miracle worker.		miracles	Reza Aslan
2fb450f	For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argument opposing it.		historical-jesus scholarship	Reza Aslan
0aa61a3	My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ.			Reza Aslan
4cd1c5b	Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you.			Reza Aslan
fb76a5b	the famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as "a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors."			Reza Aslan
fe149de	One day, while he was idly reciting his verses to a captive audience, a scrap of paper, borne by the wind, landed on his lap. On it were written two words: "Layla" and "Majnun." As the crowd watched, Majnun tore the paper in half. The half on which was written "Layla" he crumpled into a ball and threw over his shoulder; the half with his own name he kept for himself. "What does this mean?" someone asked. "Do you not realize that one name is..			Reza Aslan
ee6af87	While the exact changes Muhammad made to this tradition are far too complex to discuss in detail here, it is sufficient to note that women in the Ummah were, for the first time, given the right both to inherit the property of their husbands and to keep their dowries as their own personal property throughout their marriage. Muhammad also forbade a husband to touch his wife's dowry, forcing him instead to provide for his family from his own w..			Reza Aslan
fdacafc	Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time.			Reza Aslan
76ecc1c	There is a term for this phenomenon--politicomorphism, or "the divinization of earthly politics"--and it is, to this day, one of the central features of nearly every religious system in the world."			Reza Aslan
d637d01	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. 1"			Reza Aslan
da44720	The only way to survive in a community where movement was the norm and material accumulation impractical was to maintain a strong sense on tribal solidarity by evenly sharing all available resources.		nomads tribe	Reza Aslan
0cdddf5	the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus's life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus's words and deeds recorded by people who knew him. They are testimonies of faith composed by communities of faith and written many years after the events they describe. Simply put, the gospels tell us about Jesus the Christ, not Jesus the man.			Reza Aslan
a6633d1	Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.			Reza Aslan
5f4cacd	Those who did know Jesus - those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God's name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death - played a surprisingly small role in defining the movement Jesus left behing.		jesus	Reza Aslan
06a84b3	Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh would be resurrected, but they did not accept the resurrection of the mases		pharaoh resurection	Reza Aslan
b13d09b	The common depiction of Jesus as an inveterate peacemaker who "loved his enemies" and "turned the other cheek" has been built mostly on his portrayal as an apolitical preacher with no interest in or, for that matter, knowledge of politically turbulent world in which he lived. That picture of Jesus has already been shown to be complete fabrication. The Jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence. There is no evidence tha..		jesus pacifism	Reza Aslan
8608890	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 which actually means "bandits" and was the most common Roman designation for an insurrectionist or rebel."			Reza Aslan
bfb4f24	But Jesus's message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities of Galilee. The message was simple: the Lord God had seen the suffering of the poor and dispossessed; he had heard their cries of anguish. And he was finally going to do something about it			Reza Aslan
318c82e	Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus's teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which Jesus allegedly tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36). Not only is this the sole passage in the gospels where Jesus makes such a claim, it is an imprecise translation of the original Greek. The phrase ouk estin ek tou kosm..			Reza Aslan
e0a3ce5	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.			Reza Aslan

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