Reza Aslan Quotes

#1. Paul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.

Reza Aslan

#2. There is absolutely no difference between religion and politics at all in Jesus' time. In other words, every seemingly religious word that came out of Jesus' mouth had very clear and unmistakable political connotations to it.

Reza Aslan

#3. 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?

Reza Aslan

#4. The separation of "church and state" of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community.

Reza Aslan

#5. Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.

Reza Aslan

#6. A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

Reza Aslan

#7. The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is What do these stories mean?

Reza Aslan

#8. Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism.

Reza Aslan

#9. Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion

Reza Aslan

#10. Thus, the Quran promises that all those who believe - the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians - anyone who believes in God and the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear

Reza Aslan

#11. 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

#12. Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.

Reza Aslan

#13. All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost complete stultification of independent though

Reza Aslan

#14. There's only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified.

Reza Aslan

#15. 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.

Reza Aslan

#16. Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, "We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race." Among

Reza Aslan

#17. Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God.

Reza Aslan

#18. 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).

Reza Aslan

#19. Islam is more than a religion, it's much more than a religion, it's a way of life, it is a one party political system that has a very elaborate legal system that can put you to death if you leave it.

Reza Aslan

#20. I think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.

Reza Aslan

#21. In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.

Reza Aslan

#22. [ ... ] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [ ... ]

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#23. Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.

Reza Aslan

#24. I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

Reza Aslan

#25. Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

Reza Aslan

#26. No one speaks for God - not even the prophets (who speak about God).

Reza Aslan

#27. One-fifth of Americans, 20% believe that Barak Obama is, himself, a Muslim and in fact - amongst Republicans that number is almost 40%. Polls show in this country, that the more you disagree with Barak Obama's domestic policies, the more likely you are to think that he is a Muslim.

Reza Aslan

#28. Whether you're talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it's all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

Reza Aslan

#29. When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

Reza Aslan

#30. I have watched Muslims chant 'Death to America!' on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

Reza Aslan

#31. I really believe that to have a full impression of Jesus, both as Christ as a man, you must know about the world that gave shape to him - the world out of which he arose.

Reza Aslan

#32. 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. Indeed, it is precisely at those moments when sacred and genuine history collide that religions are born.

Reza Aslan

#33. 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.

Reza Aslan

#34. There's nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

Reza Aslan

#35. 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.

Reza Aslan

#36. 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.

Reza Aslan

#37. By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were able to create narratives to counter each and every one of them.

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#38. 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.

Reza Aslan

#39. The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.

Reza Aslan

#40. Both gospels employ the term "Son of God" exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description.

Reza Aslan

#41. [ ... ] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

Reza Aslan

#42. 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.

Reza Aslan

#43. Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions.

Reza Aslan

#44. Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it's the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

Reza Aslan

#45. Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required no intermediate whatsoever, but could be accessed by anyone.

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#46. My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

Reza Aslan

#47. This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply the god.

Reza Aslan

#48. 'Zeal' is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended.

Reza Aslan

#49. In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.

Reza Aslan

#50. The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you're writing about something that people take very seriously.

Reza Aslan

#51. The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran's revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution.

Reza Aslan

#52. Every single interview I have ever done on TV or in print says I'm a Muslim.

Reza Aslan

#53. A king with no place to lay his head. A king who came to serve, not to be served.

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#54. God doesn't make you a bigot. You're just a bigot.

Reza Aslan

#55. Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

Reza Aslan

#56. What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that's what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely belong to the religious class.

Reza Aslan

#57. But there I have another name. You must learn to know me by that name. This was the very reason you were brought into Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you might know me better there.

Reza Aslan

#58. The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.

Reza Aslan

#59. Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived - an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever transform the faith and practice of Judaism - then, in some ways, his biography writes itself.

Reza Aslan

#60. I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context ... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

Reza Aslan

#61. Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

Reza Aslan

#62. As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.

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#63. Muhammad's example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran. Certainly,

Reza Aslan

#64. 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.

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#65. 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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#66. I'm a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make the most sense to me.

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#67. 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.

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#68. Those who treat the muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin : the objectification of women

Reza Aslan

#69. Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they'd like to admit, in that all of them very much want to see a role of religion in society.

Reza Aslan

#70. Nestorian Christians argued that Jesus had two completely distinct natures - one human, the other divine - while Gnostic Christians, especially those called Docetists, claimed that Jesus only appeared to be human but was in fact fully God.

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#71. Indonesia, women are absolutely 100 percent equal to men

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#72. There were dozens of people who walked through the Holy Land claiming to be the Messiah, curing the sick, exorcising demons, challenging Rome, gathering followers. In a way, there's nothing unique about what Jesus did. In fact, many of these so-called false Messiahs we know by name.

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#73. The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.

Reza Aslan

#74. It has often been noted that the biblical stories recounted in the Quran, especially those dealing with Jesus, imply a familiarity with the traditions and narratives of the Christian faith.

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#75. Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America's diverse Muslim population - that they are foreign and exotic and un-American - was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a century ago.

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#76. When you're a brown Muslim from Iran talking about Jesus on TV, you need to keep your cool at all times, OK? That's not rocket science.

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#77. The Muslim community is completely fractured - it doesn't really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.

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#78. Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into the cause of jihad.

Reza Aslan

#79. Islam doesn't promote violence or peace. Islam is just a religion, and like every religion in the world, it depends on what you bring to it. If you're a violent person, your Islam, your Judaism, your Christianity, your Hinduism, is going to be violent.

Reza Aslan

#80. 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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#81. Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within.

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#82. Throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran.

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#83. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

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#84. Whether or not you believe that after three days of being dead and entombed, Jesus got up and walked out of his own accord, what you cannot argue about is the fervent belief of the followers that this happened.

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#85. Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.

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#86. Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God in three successive modes of being: first as the Father, then as the Son, and finally and forevermore as the Holy Spirit.

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#87. The relationship between the Jews and pagan Arabs was symbiotic in that not only were the Jews heavily Arabized, but the Arabs were also significantly influenced by Jewish beliefs and practices.

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#88. no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.

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#89. 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.

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#90. It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

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#91. [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).

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#92. I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to be Muslim.

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#93. The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

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#94. 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

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#95. 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.

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#96. The Samaritans denied the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole place of worship. They instead worshiped God on Mount Gerizim. though this was essentially the only religious difference between the two peoples, it was enough for the Samaritans not to be considered Jews.

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#97. 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.

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#98. Jesus's titulus reads KING OF THE JEWS. His crime: striving for kingly rule; sedition. And so, like every bandit and revolutionary, every rabble-rousing zealot and apocalyptic prophet who came before or after him -

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#99. Of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern

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#100. The bandits tapped into the widespread apocalyptic expectation that had gripped the Jews of Palestine in the wake of the Roman invasion.

Reza Aslan