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...
More than a thousand years before Christ, Zarathustra preached the existence of a heaven and a hell, the idea of a bodily resurrection, the promise of a universal savior who would one day be miraculou...
Minds are not changed merely through acquiring data or information (if that were the case it would take no effort to convince Americans that Obama is, in fact, a Christian). Rather, it is solely throu...
Matthew and Luke also relied on what must have been an early and fairly well distributed collection of Jesus’s sayings that scholars have termed Q (German for Quelle, or source). Although we no longer...
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...
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...
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...
Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome), enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly...
Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth. I have not come to bring peace, but the sword. MATTHEW 10:34
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.
Athena was originally worshiped as a flat piece of olive wood that was washed and bejeweled, wrapped in garments, and carefully tended by a cadre of her priestesses.16
At the center of Zoroastrian theology was a unique monotheistic system based on the sole god, Ahura Mazda (the Wise Lord). Like most ancients, Zarathustra could not easily conceive of his god as being...
As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised messiah. Factual accuracy wa...
As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians...