I find anthropology is a marvellous discipline to shock me out of my own world into another world.

I can be absolutely comfortable with an apocalyptic Jesus because he was simply wrong. As long as he's wrong I don't worry about him, and basically everyone else who was announcing in the year 2000 at midnight, the end of the world is coming, I expect them to be wrong. Now if they're right of course, I'll be very uncomfortable that night. But as long as everyone for 2000 years has been wrong about the apocalypse, I can be quite comfortable with it. It's space fiction.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

Jesus told parables. When he wanted to say something really profound about God, he went into parable. I don't find it surprising then that when earliest Christianity wanted to say something profound about Jesus, they went into parable too. That doesn't mean everything is a parable. When it says Jesus was in Nazareth I don't think that's a parable, I think Jesus was in Nazareth. When it talks about Jesus walking on the water, I don't think that's the point at all, I think the point is that the church without Jesus sinks.

Jesus' death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be. For if no follower of Jesus had written anything for one hundred years after his crucifixition, we would still know about him from two authors not among his supporters. Their names are Flavius Josephus and Cornelius Tacitus.

Jesus called for nonviolent resistance to Rome and just distribution of land and food. He was crucified because he threatened Roman stability -- not as a sacrifice to God for humanity's sins.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.