Literary Birthday – 3 May – Reza Aslan

Happy Birthday, Reza Aslan, born 3 May 1972.

Nine Quotes

1. 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.
2. A politician is a politician whether he’s wearing a suit or a funny hat.
3. 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.
4. Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
5. The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.
6. The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it’s a product of the scientific revolution.
7. The New Testament is not a historical document.
8. The first-century Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not composing a historical biography about a human being.
9. 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.

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American writer and scholar of religions. His books include the international best-seller No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, and ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

Source for Image:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reza_aslan_2013.jpg

Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

Please click here for our Literary Birthday Calendar

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