It seems likely that Jesus, being a scholarly young man, learned some Hebrew, but that's conjecture. It's more likely that Jesus spoke some Greek, as this language dominated the region after the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century.
As the Persians wrote very little about how they ran their affairs, the Greek propaganda of the 5th century B.C. has for centuries gone virtually unchallenged - indeed, for Edward Said, it was the beginning of Europe's long habit of misunderstanding and ill-informed contempt of the Middle East.
Before I wrote 'God's War,' I probably did eight years of research into the Middle East, Judaism, Islam, Catholicisim, and all sorts of fabulous other things.
Jerusalem is ... the fabled city which for the Western mind is as much dream as stone ... a compressed symbol of our most sublime aspirations along with our most disgusting, hatefully brainless excursions into religious bigotry and fratricide.
It is not necessary to agree with the Arab point of view about their own history, but it is foolish to ignore it.
The Bible teaches that history began in the Middle East, and someday history will end in the Middle East.
The New York Times reports that Moammar Gadhafi spent his last days hovering between defiance and delusion, surviving on rice and pasta. In other words, Gadhafi spent his last days as a sophomore in college. That's what I did.
Palestinians were religious in many ways, but they did not subscribe to political Islam, historically.
Arab civilization has collapsed. It won’t recover in my lifetime.
The Middle East is gorgeous, but again, politically, I would not want to go there.
Jerusalem is old, Jerusalem is new, Jerusalem can hold Moslem, Christian, Jew.
