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...
Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.
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
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...
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...
874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi
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...
But, as in the rest of Galilee, the profits firm this increase in the means of production disproportionately benefited the large landowners and moneylenders who resided outside Capernaum: the wealthy...
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...
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...
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...
By the time these stories were written, six decades had passed since the crucifixion. In that time, the evangelists had heard just about every conceivable objection to the resurrection, and they were...
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.
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.
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...
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...
It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth.
Ezekiel declared, in the center of all nations
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...
[...] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]