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
Many of the prophets of Jesus's time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.
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.
Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.
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.
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.
Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
Every single interview I have ever done on TV or in print says I'm a Muslim.
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.
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.
Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
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.
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.
The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago... the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I had been taught about in church.
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.
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.
It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.
The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.
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.
It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America's foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.
The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.
There's no question that homophobia is rampant among the world's 1.5 billion Muslims - but that doesn't negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual orientation, like LGBT people in other faith communities.
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.
The New Testament is not a historical document.
I wouldn't call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was God.
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.
The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren't American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.
The Muslim community is completely fractured - it doesn't really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.
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.
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.
The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it's a product of the scientific revolution.
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.
Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.
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.
When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.
I'm interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that's a topic I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.
Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it's possible.
In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.
'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.
You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.
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.
American Muslims - young American Muslims in particular - are starting to understand that unless they are willing to stand up for all the other oppressed communities in this country, including those discriminated against for their gender or sexuality, then no one will stand up for them.
The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.
My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.
