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...
Consider, for example, how the following verse (4:34) regarding the obligations of men toward women has been rendered into English by two different but widely read contemporafirst is from the Princeto...
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...
Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion
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...
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 convert,after all. His mother was Arab. His people, the Idumeans, had come to Judaism only a generation or two earlier.
—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...
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 memory of the revolutionary zealot who walked across Galilee gathering an army of disciples with the goal of establishing the Kingdom of God on earth, the magnetic preacher who defied the authorit...
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...
Rome named Herod King of the Jews, granting him a kingdom that would ultimately grow larger than that of King Solomon.
No more client-kings. No more King of the Jews. Jerusalem now belonged wholly to Rome.
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.
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...
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...
[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).
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...