#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - 'A lucid, intelligent page-turner' (Los Angeles Times) that challenges long-held assumptions about Jesus Two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher 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 executed as a state criminal. Within decades after his death, his followers would call him God. Sifting through centuries of mythmaking, Reza Aslan sheds new light on one of history's most enigmatic figures by examining Jesus through the lens of the tumultuous era in which he lived. Balancing the Jesus of the Gospels against the historical sources, Aslan describes a man full of conviction and passion, yet rife with contradiction. He explores the reasons the early Christian church preferred to promulgate an image of Jesus as a peaceful spiritual teacher rather than a politically conscious revolutionary. And he