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

Anyone who says that Iran will commit suicide with its nuclear power is a moron and has no business in discussion.

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...

The very purpose of designing the Temple of Jerusalem as a series of ever more restrictive ingressions was to maintain the priestly monopoly over who can and cannot come into the presence of God and...

American Muslims – young American Muslims in particular – are starting to understand that unless they are willing to stand up for all the other oppressed communities in this country, including those discriminated against for...

There’s only one reason to be crucified under the Roman Empire, and that is for treason or sedition. Crucifixion, we have to understand, was not actually a form of capital punishment for Rome. In fact,...

In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.

A politician is a politician whether he’s wearing a suit or a funny hat.

In the history of the prophetic biblical canon that starts with Genesis, the Koran is by far the most tolerant of the views of other religions.

The Jews integrated themselves into American life to the point that the argument that the Jews aren’t American sounded so stupid, that people stopped thinking it.

Pilate, as the histories reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen...

What the printing press is to Christianity in the 16th century, that’s what the Internet is doing to Islam now. It has opened up the monopoly over the interpretation of Islam that used to solely...

Many of the prophets of Jesus’s time were thought to just be mad men, just sort of crazy people who were claiming to channel the divine. Perhaps that means we should be a little less...

Is it possible that Jesus, unlike 98 percent of his fellow Jews, was literate and educated? Yes, it’s possible.

Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer’s uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green...

When you forcefully suppress religious nationalism, you radicalize it.

I have watched Muslims chant ‘Death to America!’ on the streets of Tehran, then privately beg me to help them get a visa to the United States.

Thus it is written that the messiah would suffer and rise again on the third day,” Jesus instructs his disciples (Luke 24:44–46). Except that nowhere is any such thing written: not in the Law of...

The key to recognizing who Jesus was is to recognize this fundamental truth: He was a Jew.

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims – not excuse it, but expect it. And that’s happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in...

The idea of literalism in the Bible is a very new phenomenon. In many ways, it’s a product of the scientific revolution.

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...

It is no exaggeration to say that Syria holds the key for nearly all of America’s foreign policy goals in the Middle East. As Syria goes, so goes the region.

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

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...

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

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.

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...

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

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

The New Testament is not a historical document.

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...

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...

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

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...

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.

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.

…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...

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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