The task of defining Jesus's message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these extraordinary men and women, many of them immersed in Greek philosophy and Hellenistic thought, began to reinterpret Jesus's message so as to make it more palatable both to their fellow Greek-speaking Jews and to their gentile neighbors in the Diaspora, they gradually transformed Jesus from a revolutionary zealot to a Romanized demigod, from a man who tried and failed to free the Jews from Roman oppression to a celestial being wholly uninterested in any earthly matter. Reza Aslan
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. - Elie Wiesel

  2. Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person's essence? We... - Haruki Murakami

  3. The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace. - Mahatma Gandhi

  4. He suddenly recalled from Plato's Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split then in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost. - Milan Kundera

  5. It does not matter how long you are spending on the earth, how much money you have gathered or how much attention you have received. It is the amount of positive vibration you have radiated in life that matters, - Amit Ray

More Quotes By Reza Aslan
  1. College was at the heart of his sentimental imagination.

  2. Stories are "how we organize the chaos of experience into the order we require just a carry-on." Joan Gideon

  3. Presidents are also always storytellers, purveyors of useful national mythologies.

  4. Politics is motion." John Sears

  5. What does sincerity mean if it is chosen as deliberate strategy?

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