But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.
Both gospels employ the term Son of God exactly as it is used throughout the Hebrew Scriptures: as a royal title, not a description.
Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible dealing with the messiah presents him as performin...
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...
As for the high priest—the wretch who betrayed God’s chosen people to Rome for some coin and the right to prance about in his spangled garments? His very existence was an insult to God. It was a bligh...
As a believer and a pantheist, I worship God not through fear and trembling but through awe and wonder at the workings of the universe—for the universe is God. I pray to God not to ask for things but...
And finally, when the celebrated Quranic commentator Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi (1149–1209) interpreted the verse [God] created spouses for you of your own kind so that you may have peace of mind through th...
A true Sufi, Shaykh Haeri writes, does not separate the inner from the outer, for when you start by purifying your inner self, you end up being concerned with the outer and with society.
The overwhelming consensus is that the traditions contained within the epistle can confidently be traced to James the Just. That would make James’s epistle arguably one of the most important books in...
The hadith, insofar as they addressed issues not dealt with in the Quran, would become an indispensable tool in the formation of Islamic law. However, in their earliest stages, the hadith were muddled...
The Prophet himself sometimes openly suppressed or negated older verses, considering them to have been replaced by newer ones. That is because Muhammad did not consider the Quran to be a static Revela...
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...
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 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...
It could be known only through six divine evocations that it brought forth into the world from its own being: wisdom, truth, power, love, unity, and immortality. These are not so much Ahura Mazda’s at...
Islam and Judaism in seventh-century Arabia operated within the same sphere of religious discourse, in that both shared the same religious characters, stories, and anecdotes, both discussed the same f...
How could the Law of Retribution function properly when one party in a dispute was so wealthy and so powerful as to be virtually untouchable?
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...