"When religious scholar Reza Aslan was 15, he went to an evangelical Christian camp. For the first time, he heard the gospel story — the story of Jesus. It was a profound experience for him, and he immediately converted. But later, when Aslan went to college and began working toward a degree in the New Testament, he found he had doubts."

"'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,' he tells NPR's Rachel Martin."

"Aslan became more interested in Jesus the man than Jesus the Messiah, and that's now the subject of his new book, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. 'That person became so much more real to me than the celestial spirit that I had been introduced to in church,' Alsan says."