Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day, Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46). Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of Moses,...
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...
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...
Among Romans, crucifixion originated as a deterrence against revolt of slaves, probably as early as 200 B.C.E. By Jesus's time, it was the primary form of punishment for "inciting rebellion" (i.e., tr...
Creciente ira y el descontento entre los judíos.
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
The Romans may be known for many things, but humor isn't one of them. As usual, this interpretation relies on a prima facie reading of Jesus as a man with no political ambitions whatsoever. That is no...
Themselves: Give back (apodidomi) to Caesar the property that belongs to Caesar … The verb apodidomi, often translated as render unto, is actually a compound word: apo is a preposition that in this ca...
Manism (ancestor cults)—but it was not as concerned
The Rationalists argued that God’s attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation.
Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn't understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people struggle to...
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.
Of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern
This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus's birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would ha...
The gospels claim that on either side of Jesus hung men who in Greek are called lestai, a word often rendered into English as thieves but which actually means bandits and was the most common Roman des...
The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.
RELIGIONS BECOME INSTITUTIONS when the myths and rituals that once shaped their sacred histories are transformed into authoritative models of orthodoxy (the correct interpretation of myths) and orthop...
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...
Indeed, everything that is currently being said about America’s diverse Muslim population—that they are foreign and exotic and un-American—was said about Catholic and Jewish immigrants nearly a centur...
How one in the modern world views Jesus's miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates...