Because human beings do not have the capacity to attain knowledge of God on their own, the Imam becomes a continuous necessity for all societies and in every era. So in addition to the fixed number of...
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...
All religions are inextricably bound to the social, spiritual, and cultural milieux from which they arose and in which they developed. It is not prophets who create religions. Prophets are, above all,...
A prophet, claim the Shi‘ah, is someone who has, by the divine will, become conscious of God’s eternal message, which forever envelops creation like a numinous ether we cannot escape, while the Imam i...
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...
Must recognize that greater knowledge about Islam is not enough to alter people’s perceptions of Muslims. Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it w...
Another tradition told about the demise of Herod the Great: that sometime between his death in 4 B.C.E. and the Roman takeover of Judea in 6 C.E., in an obscure hillside village in Galilee, a child wa...
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.
Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god tends to be monomythic; it not only rejects all other gods, it rejects all other explanations f...
To begin with, with the possible exception of the gospel of Luke, none of the gospels we have were written by the person after whom they are named.
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.
There is no evidence that Jesus himself openly advocated violent actions. But he was certainly no pacifist. Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but t...
There are striking similarities between the Christian and Quranic descriptions of the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the paradise awaiting those who have been saved.
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 principal task of the messiah, who was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah...
The passage proves not only that Jesus, the one they call messiah probably existed, but that by the year 94 C.E., when the Antiquities was written, he was widely recognized as the founder of a new and...
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...
One would think that Jesus’s admonishment not to teach others to break the Law of Moses would have had some impact on Paul. But Paul seems totally unconcerned with anything Jesus-in-the-flesh may or m...
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.