The task of defining Jesus's message fell instead to a new crop of educated, urbanized, Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews who would become the primary vehicles for the expansion of the new faith. As these...
Those who treat the muslim woman not as an individual but as a symbol either of Islamic chastity or secular liberalism are guilty of the same sin : the objectification of women
The first century was an era of apocalyptic expectation among the Jews of Palestine, the unofficial Roman designation for the vast tract of land encompassing modern day Israel/Palestine as well as lar...
Most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interes...
For every well-attested, heavily researched, and eminently authoritative argument made about the historical Jesus, there is an equally well-attested, equally researched, and equally authoritative argu...
Even the Quran, which Sufis respect as the direct speech of God, lacks the capacity to shed light upon God’s essence. As one Sufi master has argued, why spend time reading a love letter (by which he m...
As the ninth-century legal scholar Malik ibn Anas, founder of the Maliki school of law, once quipped, This religion is a science, so pay close attention to those from whom you learn it.
The Samaritans denied the primacy of the Temple of Jerusalem as the sole place of worship. They instead worshiped God on Mount Gerizim. though this was essentially the only religious difference betwee...
But Jesus’s message was designed to be a direct challenge to the wealthy and the powerful, be they the occupiers in Rome, the collaborators in the Temple, or the new moneyed class in the Greek cities...
The common depiction of Jesus as an inveterate peacemaker who loved his enemies and turned the other cheek has been built mostly on his portrayal as an apolitical preacher with no interest in or, for...
Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mas...
Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage...
Unlike their brethren in the Holy Land, Diaspora Jews spoke Greek, not Aramaic: Greek was the language of their thought process, the language of their worship.
The Bible is replete with ablutionary practices: objects (a tent, a sword) were sprinkled with water to dedicate them to the Lord; people (lepers, menstruating women) were fully immersed in water as a...
The famed French theorist Ernest Renan, who years ago defined the nation as a group of people united in a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors.
The so-called Muslim women's movement is predicated on the idea that Muslim men, not Islam, have been responsible for the suppression of women's rights
Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of...
Of course, in Jerusalem, landed aristocracy more or less meant the priestly class, and specifically, that handful of wealthy priestly families who maintained the Temple and who, as a result, were char...
It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth.
[...] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]