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

I'm talking from the point of view of the States, we tend to assassinate people like Jesus, or if we don't we simply marginalise them. Oprah would have all those who think they are Messiah on her show, and we'd have six people who all claimed to be the Messiah, and we'd have got rid of Jesus and laughed him out of town. So as long as the Jesus that I'm hearing is there, I don't find him very comfortable.

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.

What I notice, as a historian reading stories about so-called nature miracles, the walking on the water, or the miraculous catch of fishes, they're done especially for the insiders, for the disciples. Usually healings and exorcisms are done for people along the road, as it were. Jesus doesn't come on the water to save the fishing fleet from Capernaum, he comes on the water to save the disciples. It's a parable, dummy, it's a parable, don't you get it? If the leadership of the church takes off in a boat without Jesus, it will sink, it will get nowhere.

Jesus is what God looks like in sandals

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.

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.