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...
Of observable and verifiable events in the past is a product of the modern
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 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...
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.
Herod was not just the emperor’s client-king. He was a close and personal friend, a loyal citizen of the Republic who wanted more than to emulate Rome; he wanted to remake it in the sands of Judea. He...
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...
A similar lack of concern about Jesus’s earthly origins can be found in the first gospel, Mark, written just after 70 C.E. Mark’s focus is kept squarely on Jesus’s ministry; he is uninterested either...
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.
Creciente ira y el descontento entre los judíos.
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...
Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus’s status as the anointed of God. The d...
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...
Obviously James did not himself write the epistle; he was, like his brother Jesus and most of the apostles, an illiterate peasant with no formal education. James’s epistle was probably written by some...
Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion
Little by little over the following decade, the Jewish sect founded by a group of rural Galileans morphed into a religion of urbanized Greek speakers. No longer bound by the confines of the Temple and...
In other words, according to Jesus, Caesar is entitled to be given back the denarius coin, not because he deserves tribute, but because it is his coin: his name and picture are stamped on it.
In contrast, paganism among the sedentary societies of Arabia had developed from its earlier and simpler manifestations into a complex form of neo-animism, providing a host of divine and semi-divine i...
Consider this: Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition. The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus’s head as he writhed in pain—King of the Jews—was...
The gospel writers for whom history was not a matter of uncovering facts, but of revealing truths.