Montanist Christians like Tertullian believed that Jesus possessed the same divine quality as God, but not in the same quantity as God. Modalist Christians conceived of the Trinity as representing God...
Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.
Judea is, for all intents and purposes, a temple-state.
The messiah was popularly believed to be the descendant of King David, and so his principal task was to rebuild David’s kingdom and reestablish the nation of Israel. Thus, to call oneself the messiah...
The choice between James’s vision of a Jewish religion anchored in the Law of Moses and derived from a Jewish nationalist who fought against Rome, and Paul’s vision of a Roman religion that divorced i...
Por lo tanto, un relato inventado por Marcos, con propósitos estrictamente evangelizadores, para absolver a Roma de toda culpa por la muerte de Jesús, se amplía hasta el punto del absurdo, convirtiénd...
No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.
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).
In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.
In recognition of his service, Rome named Herod King of the Jews, granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon
For most of the Western world, September 11, 2001, signaled the commencement of a worldwide struggle between Islam and the West—the ultimate manifestation of the clash of civilizations. From the Islam...
Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition.
874 The occultation of the Twelfth Imam, or the Mahdi
Twofold profession of faith, or shahadah, that would henceforth define both the mission and principles of the movement: There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.
Of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern
Creciente ira y el descontento entre los judíos.
[God] has established for you [the Arabs] the same religion enjoined on Noah, on Abraham, on Moses, and on Jesus, the Quran says (42:13).
Yet lost in the debate about America’s true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries m...
Those who did know Jesus - those who followed him into Jerusalem as its king and helped him cleanse the Temple in God's name, who were there when he was arrested and who watched him die a lonely death...
The Spanish philosopher and physician Ibn Rushd (1126–98), better known as Averroës in the West, pushed al-Jabbar’s conception of truth to its limit by proposing a two truths theory of knowledge in wh...