New Delhi:
US-based writer-scholar Reza Aslan saw a great distance between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith and wanted to share the story of "this illiterate, uneducated, poor, pious peasant from Galilee who started a movement on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed".
This gave birth to his book "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth".
"The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognise. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means," he says.
"Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth", published by HarperCollins India imprint Element, is a fascinating, provocative and meticulously researched biography that challenges long-held assumptions about the man we know as Jesus of Nazareth.
"This is a historical biography of a man who lived two thousand years ago. It is not a theological tract. It is not a book about Christianity because Jesus wasn't a Christian, he was a Jew," the Iran-born Aslan says.
According to the author, he was introduced to the historical Jesus in college.
"A few years earlier I had heard the Gospel story and converted to Christianity. When I went to college I decided that I was going to spend my life studying the New Testament. But I discovered that there was a great distance between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith."
He says, in fact, most of what he had been told about Jesus was incomplete if not incorrect.
"And although I ended up abandoning Christianity as a religion I continued to study the historical Jesus. What I discovered was an individual that was so much more than what I had known about him as Christ," Aslan, currently associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, told PTI in an interview.
"The story of this illiterate, uneducated, poor, pious peasant from Galilee who started a movement on behalf of the poor and the dispossessed - a movement that was so threatening to the religious and political powers of this time that he was executed as a state criminal - became so much more real to me than the story of the celestial spirit I had heard in church. I wanted to share that story with others, and that is why I wrote this book."
