Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

by Reza Aslan

Zeal, the spirit that had fueled the revolutionary fervor of the bandits, prophets, and messiahs, was now coursing through the population

like a virus working its way through the body.

The Jews revered water for its liminal qualities, believing it had the power to transport a person or object from one state to another: from unclean to clean, from profane to holy.

It would be these people whom Jesus would specifically target—those who found themselves cast to the fringes of society, whose lives had been disrupted by the rapid social and economic shifts taking place throughout Galilee.

the charismatic authority with which Jesus spoke,

“If anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received [from me], let him be damned” (Galatians 1:9). Even if that gospel comes “from an angel in heaven,” Paul writes, his congregations should ignore it (Galatians 1:8). Instead, they should obey Paul and only Paul:

“Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).

every one of the nearly two thousand bishops he had gathered in Nicaea to permanently define Christianity was a Roman.

Paul’s conception of Christianity may have been heretical before 70 C.E. But afterward, his notion of a wholly new religion free from the authority of a Temple that no longer existed, unburdened by a law that no longer mattered, and divorced from a Judaism that had become a pariah was enthusiastically embraced