The Muslim community is completely fractured – it doesn’t really exist anymore; the only place it does exist is online.

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 itself...

The idea that education will lead to a lessening of bigotry is just factually incorrect.

I’m a person of faith, and the language that I use to define my faith, the symbols and metaphors that I rely upon to express my faith, are those provided by Islam because they make...

Paul may be an excellent source for those interested in the early formation of Christianity, but he is a poor guide for uncovering the historical Jesus.

A cosmic war is like a ritual drama in which participants act out on Earth a battle they believe is actually taking place in the heavens.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context… you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have...

The New Testament is not a historical document.

Religion doesn’t make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

Paul’s portrayal of Jesus as Christ may sound familiar to contemporary Christians—it has since become the standard doctrine of the church—but it would have been downright bizarre to Jesus’s Jewish followers. The transformation of the...

I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to...

Every single interview I have ever done on TV or in print says I’m a Muslim.

Scattered across the Roman Empire, it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence, revolution or...

The truth of the matter is that when you write about religion like I do, you’re writing about something that people take very seriously.

Nobody, absolutely nobody, straps a bomb on their body because they were recruited from the Internet. It takes an enormous amount of personal face-to-face contact and time in order to recruit a young person into...

What evil has he done?” But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. “Crucify him! Crucify him!” (Mark 15:1–20). The scene is absolutely nonsensical. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists not...

My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves ‘Persian.’ Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

…most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in...

There’s no question that homophobia is rampant among the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims – but that doesn’t negate the fact that there are huge groups of Muslims who have easily reconciled their faith and sexual...

No one speaks for God – not even the prophets (who speak about God)

You can be a follower of Jesus and not necessarily be a Christian.

How one in the modern world views Jesus’s miraculous actions is irrelevant. All that can be known is how the people of his time viewed them. And therein lies the historical evidence. For while debates...

There’s nothing more distasteful than an academic having to, like, trot out his credentials. You really come off as a jerk when you do that.

Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.

Muhammad was not yet establishing a new religion; he was calling for sweeping social reforms. He was not yet preaching monotheism; he was demanding economic justice.

Whether or not you believe that after three days of being dead and entombed, Jesus got up and walked out of his own accord, what you cannot argue about is the fervent belief of the...

All these schools of though gradually transformed into legal institutions, the diversity of ideas and freedom of opinion that characterized their early development gave way to rigid formalism, strict adherence to precedent, and an almost...

I believe in God, which means I am open to some absurd possibilities. But I understand the power of that faith, and I understand the metaphor of that belief.

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single...

Whether you’re talking about MSNBC or Fox or CNN, it’s all about getting enough interest out there, sensationalizing the story in such a way that people are compelled to tune in.

The Revolutionary Guard controls almost everything in Iran, and this is hurting the people.

Certainly the shahadah contained an important theological innovation, but that innovation was not monotheism. With this simple profession of faith, Muhammad was declaring to Mecca that the God of the heavens and the earth required...

Literature offers not just a window into the culture of diverse regions, but also the society, the politics; it’s the only place where we can keep track of ideas.

[…] there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy […]

The more I started studying the historical Jesus, the man who lived 2,000 years ago… the more I started to realize that there was this chasm between the historical Jesus and the Jesus that I...

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...

‘Zeal’ is essentially a compromising devotion to God, a commitment to cleansing the Holy Land of all foreign and pagan presences and to re-establish the kingdom of David as God had intended.

I wouldn’t call myself a Christian because I do not believe that Jesus is God, nor do I believe that he ever thought that he was God, or that he ever said that he was...

[Islam] is the dynamic conviction that a person’s spiritual and worldly responsibilities are one and the same, that an individuals duty to the community is indistinguishable from his or her duty to God.

Mike Huckabee and indeed many of the Christian conservatives in the U.S. have far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than they’d like to admit, in that all of them very much want to...

[…] pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.

There were dozens of people who walked through the Holy Land claiming to be the Messiah, curing the sick, exorcising demons, challenging Rome, gathering followers. In a way, there’s nothing unique about what Jesus did....

Jesus was surely not the first exorcist to walk the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In first-century Palestine, professional wonder worker was a vocation as well established as that of woodworker or mason, and...

It is the job of the historian to say what is likely, and of faith to say what is possible.

I’m interested in the origins of the religious experience, how the history of religion has evolved over the last umpteen thousand years, and where religiosity is going in the future. I think that’s a topic...

The Islamic Reformation is already here. We are all living in it.

Religion is never going to go away, and anyone who thinks it will doesn’t understand what religion is. It is a language to describe the experience of human nature, so for as long as people...

Like most people born into a religious tradition, my faith was as familiar to me as my skin, and just as disregardable.