TUESDAY TEASER: ZEALOT BY REZA ASLAN

Here’s another Teaser Tuesday with a difference – maybe I should call this Tuesday with a Twist! I don’t have any quotes because I don’t have the book yet, but here’s a blurb from Reza Aslan’s provocative #1 New York Times bestselling biography of Jesus, Zealot.

Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher and miracle worker walked across the Galilee, gathering followers to establish what he called the ‘Kingdom of God.’ The revolutionary movement he launched was so threatening to the established order that he was captured, tortured and executed as a state criminal. Within decades after his shameful death, his followers would call him God. Aslan describes a complex figure: a man of peace who exhorted his followers to arm themselves; an exorcist and faith healer who urged his disciples to keep his identity secret; and the seditious King of the Jews, whose promise of liberation from Rome went unfulfilled in his lifetime. Most controversially Aslan explores why the early Church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than as a politically conscious revolutionary. He calls into question the Virgin Birth and grapples with how Jesus understood himself.

The book is about to be published by Allen & Unwin in Australia … and the team there are pretty excited about it (that’s why I’m helping spread the word with a Teaser Tuesday). Here’s a quote from a review:

‘Aslan’s riveting biography seeks the “historical” Jesus – not the God-man found in the canonical Gospels but the illiterate Jew from a Palestinian backwater who fought to liberate his people from Roman occupation.’ – The New Yorker

Sound good? Is it the kind of book you’d pick up? I’m keen to see what it’s like, considering most of my ideas of Jesus come from the Gospels.

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Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!