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.
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...
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...
So identified was Jesus with Nazareth that he was known throughout his life simply as the Nazarean. Considering how common a first name Jesus was, the city of his birth became his principal sobriquet.
Rhodes, founder of the De Beers diamond company and at one time the virtual dictator of modern-day South Africa, famously declared, We Britons are the first race in the world, and the more of the worl...
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...
Obviously James did not himself write the epistle; he was, like his brother Jesus and most of the apostles, an illiterate peasant with no formal education.
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.
Luke would have had no idea what we in the modern world even mean when we say the word history. The notion of history as a critical analysis of observable and verifiable events in the past is a produc...
Like so many prophets before him, Muhammad never claimed to have invented a new religion. By his own admission, Muhammad’s message was an attempt to reform the existing religious beliefs and cultural...
It is astonishing that centuries of biblical scholarship have miscast these words as an appeal by Jesus to put aside the things of this world—taxes and tributes—and focus one’s heart instead on the on...
It is a shame that this word, myth, which originally signified nothing more than stories of the supernatural, has come to be regarded as synonymous with falsehood, when in fact myths are always true....
Indeed, if we commit to placing Jesus firmly within the social, religious, and political context of the era in which he lived—an era marked by the slow burn of a revolt against Rome that would forever...
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...
Certainly, Muhammad understood that there were distinct theological differences between Islam and the other Peoples of the Book. But he saw these differences as part of the divine plan of God, who cou...
Caesar Augustus once famously quipped, I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son.
But while these are all important determinants in explaining the tide of anti-Muslim sentiment that has washed over Europe and North America in recent years, there is another, more fundamental factor...
But no religion is inherently violent or peaceful; people are violent or peaceful.