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...
The clash of monotheisms occurs when faith, which is mysterious and ineffable and which eschews all categorizations, becomes entangled in the gnarled branches of religion.
The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It wa...
The Son of God Among Greeks and Romans, Harvard Theological Review 93.2 (2000): 85–100. Two zealous rabbis, Judas son of Sepphoraeus and Matthias son of Margalus, led an uprising that attacked the Tem...
The Ka‘ba, like the Pyramids in Egypt or the Temple in Jerusalem, may have been constructed as an axis mundi, sometimes called a navel spot: a sacred space around which the whole of the universe revol...
So then, give back to Caesar what is his, and give back to God what belongs to God. That is the zealot argument in its simplest, most concise form. And it seems to be enough for the authorities in Jer...
Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew hi...
Prophets such as Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former glory, are...
Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing his or her school of thought.
Luke places Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there, but because of the words of the prophet Micah: And you Bethlehem … from you shall come to me a ruler in Israel (Micah 5:2).
Luke means that Jesus is the new David, the King of the Jews, placed on God’s throne to rule over the Promised Land. Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor...
But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor’s religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
But tawhid, which literally means making one, implies more than just monotheism. True, there is only one God, but that is just the beginning. Tawhid means that God is Oneness. God is Unity: wholly ind...
As with all journeys, the Way has an end, though it should not be imagined as a straight road leading to a fixed destination but rather as a majestic mountain whose peak conceals the presence of God....
Actually, Paul sometimes directly contradicts Jesus. Compare what Paul writes in his epistle to the Romans—everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved (Romans 10:13)—to what Jesus says...
Acesta este locul in care vei fi cel mai aproape de Dumnezeu. Duhoarea carnagiului este imposibil de ignorat. Intra in piele si in par ca o povara otravitoare de care vei scapa cu greu. Preotii ard ta...
A Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek were traveling to a distant land when they began arguing over how to spend the single coin they possessed among themselves. All four craved food, but the Persia...
There is, however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a human being, not divine. Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represent...
Practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus...