Many poets in Iran have learned to speak almost a secret language, where political issues are talked about in allegorical ways.
In the 5,000-year history of Jewish thought, the notion of a God-man is completely anathema to everything Judaism stands for.
Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.
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.
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 had been taught about in church.
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 judgmental of some of our own crazies talking about God on the corner. They might actually have found a pretty comfortable place in Jesus's time.
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, it was often the case that the criminal would be killed first and then crucified.
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.
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 be Muslim.
I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.
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. In fact, many of these so-called false Messiahs we know by name.
'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.
My biography of Jesus is probably the first popular biography that does not use the New Testament as its primary source material.
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 struggle to describe what it means to be alive, it will be a ready-made language to express those feelings.
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 orientation, like LGBT people in other faith communities.
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 I've been chewing on for a few years; I would love to eventually work on and produce a book out of it.
