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.
[...] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy [...]
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 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...
The Rationalists argued that God’s attributes could not possibly exist coeternally with God, but must be a part of creation.
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...
Herod was convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.
Matthew implies that the kingdom belonging to the Son of Man is one and the same as the Kingdom of God. And since the Kingdom of God is built upon a complete reversal of the present order, wherein the...
It was standard Roman policy to forge alliances with the landed aristocracy in every captured city, making them dependent on the Roman overlords for their power and wealth. By aligning their interests...
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...
Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by Mark Anthony a century earlier. As...
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...
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...
—the city that had served as the religious, economic, and political capital of the Jewish nation for a thousand years, was, by the time Pompey strode through its gates, recognized less for its beauty...
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...
Thus began the long process of transforming Jesus from a revolutionary Jewish nationalist into a peaceful spiritual leader with no interest in any earthly matter. That was a Jesus the Romans could acc...
The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus's head as he writhed in pain—King of the Jews—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a...
Rome named Herod King of the Jews, granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon.