014 At the very end of Martin Scorsese’s film version of Nikos Kazantzakis’s now famous novel. The Last Temptation of Christ, Jesus returns to the Cross, from his out-of-body temptation sequence, to those last, agonizing moments of death...

022023 022 A century is a wholly arbitrary block of time. History surely does not proceed by 100-year chunks. And to mark the beginning and...

018 About 40 scholars, all specialists in the study of the historical Jesus, are seated around a table. They have just completed their discussion of a saying attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. The time has come for each to vote on a simple but...

022 The extraordinary achievement of the Hebrew Bible as history is rarely remarked on, but it is worth considering. For the Hebrew Bible contains the oldest surviving historical work as such and perhaps the earliest history ever written. We tend...

026 It is hard to believe that there are only 19 verses in chapter 22 of Genesis, the chapter that tells the story of the Binding of Isaac, or Akedah in Hebrew. More commentaries have been written on this chapter—by medievals and by...