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The New Testament is not a historical document.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.