I don't know a ton about Jesus (except what I've learned through cultural osmosis), so appreciated the information. Definitely I learned a bit about Palestine and the Jewish faith at the time. The thesis of the book is that - largely through the letters of Paul - Jesus has been transformed from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader. Aslan starts from what we know about Jesus in historical fact (which is admittedly not much) - as the book explains, most of the words written by Jesus come from people who never actually knew Jesus. He gives his conclusions on which parts of the New Testament seem plausible and which parts you need a bit more faith to believe (there's a lot of contradictions or different tellings of the same story). And he explains what Jesus most likely meant (with the words we have) based on the culture of the time, and how parts of the story changed based on the context of who was telling those parts. It's certainly interesting.