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...
Karima bint Ahmad (d. 1069) and Fatima bint Ali (d. 1087), for example, are regarded as two of the most important transmitters of the Prophet’s traditions, while Zaynab bint al-Sha’ri (d. 1220) and Da...
James’s epistle was probably written by someone from within his inner circle. Again, that is true of almost every book in the New Testament, including the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and John, as well a...
It is a miracle that we know anything at all about the man called Jesus of Nazareth. The itinerant preacher wandering from village to village clamoring about the end of the world, a band of ragged fol...
In short, Islam is not just a faith; Islam is an identity. That is true of all religions. In the United States, polls show that some 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. That d...
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...
He had been summoned to appear before a meeting of the Apostolic Council to defend his self-designated role as missionary to the gentiles (Paul insists he was not summoned to Jerusalem but went of his...
For European colonialists like Alfred, Lord Cromer, the British consul general to Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century, the veil was a symbol of the degradation of women and definitive proof tha...
Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity, one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the Jews practiced crucifixion; the pu...
But what is most desperately needed is not so much a better appreciation of our neighbor’s religion as a broader, more complete understanding of religion itself.
A Persian, a Turk, an Arab, and a Greek were traveling to a distant land when they began arguing over how to spend the single coin they possessed among themselves. All four craved food, but the Persia...
There is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself.
Together, these three gospels—Mark, Matthew, and Luke—became known as the Synoptics (Greek for viewed together) because they more or less present a common narrative and chronology about the life and m...
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.
This is no simple declaration. It is, in fact, an act of treason. In first-century Palestine, simply saying the words This is the messiah, aloud and in public, can be a criminal offense, punishable by...
The two men’s roles had to be reversed: Jesus had to be made superior, John inferior. Hence the steady regression of John’s character from the first gospel, Mark—wherein he is presented as a prophet a...
The tearing of the Temple’s veil is a fitting end to the passion narratives, the perfect symbol of what the death of Jesus meant for the men and women who reflected upon it many decades later. Jesus’s...
The census, they argued, was an abomination. It was affirmation of the slavery of the Jews. To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome. It wa...
The Romans may not have understood the Jewish religion, with its strange observances and its overwhelming obsession with ritual purity—The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred, Tacitus wrote...
The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.