Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God.
Herod’s penchant for violence and his highly publicized domestic disputes, which bordered on the burlesque, led him to execute so many members of his own family that Caesar Augustus once famously quip...
Faith is a choice; anyone who says otherwise is trying to convert you.
Considering how effortlessly religious dogma has become intertwined with political ideology, how can we overcome the clash-of-monotheisms mentality that has so deeply entrenched itself in the modern w...
Cognitive theorists have a term for what Eve just experienced. They call it her Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, or HADD. This is a biological process that arose deep in our evolutionary past,...
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 a text, the Quran is more than the foundation of the Islamic religion; it is the source of Arabic grammar. It is to Arabic what Homer is to Greek, what Chaucer is to English: a snapshot of an evolv...
Zeal implied a strict adherence to the Torah and the Law, a refusal to serve any foreign master—to serve any human master at all—and an uncompromising devotion to the sovereignty of God.
Yet the Kingdom of God in Jesus’s teachings is not a celestial kingdom existing on a cosmic plane. Those who claim otherwise often point to a single unreliable passage in the gospel of John in which J...
To accommodate the rapid influx of Europeans, entire cities were built on the outskirts of Cairo, far away from the indigenous population. The foreigners quickly took charge of Egypt’s principal expor...
This creator god was called Allah, which is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, meaning simply the god.
The reformation of Christianity was a terrifying process, but it was not, as it has so often been presented, a collision between Protestant reform and Catholic intransigence. Rather, the Christian Ref...
The first-century Jews who wrote about Jesus had already made up their minds about who he was. They were constructing a theological argument about the nature and function of Jesus as Christ, not compo...
The bedrock of evangelical Christianity, at least as it was taught to me, is the unconditional belief that every word of the Bible is God-breathed and true, literal and inerrant. The sudden realizatio...
Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primo...
My hope with this book is to spread the good news of the Jesus of history with the same fervor that I once applied to spreading the story of the Christ.
Manichaeism, the doctrine founded by the Prophet Mani, was a Gnostic religious movement heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Judaism which preached a complex, radical dualism betwee...
In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words This is the messiah, aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by crucifixion.
In fact, the term holy war originates not with Islam but with the Christian Crusaders who first used it to give theological legitimacy to what was in reality a battle for land and trade routes. Holy w...
However, because the Ulama have tended to regard Islamic practice as informing Islamic theology, orthopraxy and orthodoxy are intimately bound together in Islam, meaning questions of theology, or kala...