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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Let your yes be yes and your no be no.
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 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...
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...
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...
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 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
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...