Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the s...
Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His was a Jewish mission, one concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel was all that mattered to Jesus....
It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: today I have begotten you (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his first-born son (Exodus 4:22). But in every case...
He was a man of profound contradictions, one day preaching a message of racial exclusion (I was sent solely to the lost sheep of Israel; Matthew 15:24), the next, of benevolent universalism (Go and ma...
Grateful for their generosity, Muhammad orders the land to be leveled, the graves dug up, and the palm trees cut down for timber to build a modest home. He envisions a courtyard roofed in palm leaves,...
From the Islamic perspective, however, the attacks on New York and Washington were part of an ongoing clash between those Muslims who strive to reconcile their religious values with the realities of t...
Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—King of the Jews—was called a titulu...
The Religious Zionists have shown that they would prefer civil war in Israel to peace with the Palestinians. That is because these Jews define their national identity in terms not of civic loyalty to...
Sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed...
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Saudi regime saw an opportunity to rid itself, however temporarily, of the holy warriors it had nurtured for nearly a century. With economic and milit...
When Herod the Great died in 4 B.C.E., Augustus split his realm among his three sons
Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point of absurdity, becoming in the...
Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could a...
Three centuries of early Christian and Jewish documentation, not to mention the nearly unanimous opinion of contemporary scholars, recognize James the brother of Jesus as the head of the first Christi...
The word Imam has multiple connotations. In Sunni Islam, the imam is merely the person who stands at the head of the mosque and leads the congregation in prayer. While the Shi‘ah sometimes employ this...
The readers of Luke’s gospel, like most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality; the two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. Tha...
The only question that matters with regard to a religion and its mythology is What do these stories mean?
The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern age; it would have been an altogether foreign concept to the gospel writers for...
The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged followers trailing behind, was a common sight in Jesus’s time—so common, in fact, that i...
The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest. Scholars tend to see the Jesus they want to see. Too often they see...