That, more than anything else, explains why, throughout human history, religion has been a force both for boundless good and for unspeakable evil; why the same faith in the same God inspires love and...
That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus’s childhood about which we can be fairly confident.
That Jesus—the eternal logos from whom creation sprang, the Christ who sits at the right hand of God—you will find swaddled in a filthy manger in Bethlehem, surrounded by simple shepherds and wise men...
So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire that Cicero referred to it as that plague. Among the citizenry, the word cross (crux) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to go hang...
Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith.
Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with...
Regardless, the gospels are not, nor were they ever meant to be, a historical documentation of Jesus’s life. These are not eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s words and deeds recorded by people who knew hi...
Prophets such as Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah, who appear to be predicting the coming of a future salvific character from the line of King David that would one day restore Israel to its former glory, are...
Paul’s breezy dismissal of the very foundation of Judaism was as shocking to the leaders of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as it would have been to Jesus himself. After all, Jesus claimed to have com...
Over the last few years, the Islamic world has produced more female presidents and prime ministers than both Europe and North America combined.
One could argue that the clash of monotheisms is the inevitable result of monotheism itself. Whereas a religion of many gods posits many myths to describe the human condition, a religion of one god te...
Naming a book after a person was a standard way of reflecting that person’s beliefs or representing his or her school of thought.
Muhammad’s example must have had a lasting effect on his early followers: as Nabia Abbott has shown, throughout the first two centuries of Islam, Muslims regularly read the Torah alongside the Quran....
Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the s...
Mark’s audience was in Rome, where he himself resided. His account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was written mere months after the Jewish Revolt had been crushed
Jesus, on the other hand, was America. He was the central figure in America’s national drama. Accepting him into my heart was as close as I could get to feeling truly American.
Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His was a Jewish mission, one concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel was all that mattered to Jesus....
Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine, and his zealotry endangered the Temple authorities.
It was not unusual to be called Son of God in ancient Judaism. God calls David his son: today I have begotten you (Psalms 2:7). He even calls Israel his first-born son (Exodus 4:22). But in every case...
In Muhammad’s lifetime, the Quran was never collected in a single volume; in fact, it was never collected at all.