The Faith Instinct (44 page)

163
James L. Kugel,
How to Read the Bible
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 74-79.

164
Genesis 8:21.

165
Genesis 7:1-2.

166
Genesis 7:15-16.

167
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman,
The Bible Unearthed
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 37.

168
William G. Dever,
Who Were the Early Israelites and Where
Did They Come
From?
(Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2003), 228.

169
Ibid., 235-6.

170
Ibid., 167.

171
Kugel,
How to Read the Bible,
381-82.

172
Finkelstein and Silberman,
Bible Unearthed,
249.

173
2 Kings 22:20.

174
Paul Johnson,
A History of Christianity
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976), 43.

175
Ibid., 12.

176
Rodney Stark, The
Rise of Christianity
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 63.

177
Ibid., 7. The numbers generated by this simple calculation agree well with estimates derived independently by several historians.

178
Ibid., 160.

179
Sarah B. Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives and
Slaves:
Women
in
Classical Antiquity
(New York: Schocken, 1995), 49.

180
Stark, Rise of Christianity, 128.

181
Henry Chadwick,
The Early Church
(New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 127.

182
Ibid., 72.

183
Matthew 5:17.

184
E. P. Sanders,
The Historical Figure of Jesus
(New York: Penguin Press, 1993), 224.

185
Matthew 10:5-6.

186
Matthew 28:19.

187
Sanders,
Historical
Figure
ofJesus,
192.

188
Barrie Wilson,
How jesus
Became
Christian
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), 167.

189
Galatians 1:11-12.

190
Bart D. Ehrman,
The Lost Christianities
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 23.

191
Peter Brown,
The World of Late Antiquity
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 143.

192
James Frazer,
The Golden Bough,
(abridged) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 389.

193
Chadwick,
Early Church,
24.

194
Frazer,
Golden Bough,
346-52.

195
According to Leviticus 17, Yahweh himself told Moses that “the life of the flesh is in the blood” and that blood must on no account be eaten. “And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will ... cut him off from among his people.”

196
The Apostolic Fathers:
Early Christian Writings
(New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 194.

197
Of the fourteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament, seven are generally agreed to be authentic. They are, in order of probable composition, with estimated dates: 1 Thessalonians (A.D. 46 or 49), 1 Corinthians (A.D. 49 or 52), 2 Corinthians (A.D. 50 or 53), Philippians, Philemon, Galatians, Romans (A.D. 51-52 or 54—55). The letters to the Philippians, Philemon and Galatians are of unknown date but seem to have been written between 2 Corinthians and Romans. Donald Harman Akenson,
Saint Saul
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 145.

198
1 Corinthians 11:23.

199
The phrase occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:20. It is sometimes translated “the Lord’s supper,” as for example by James D. G. Gunn in his
Christianity in the Making
(Vol. 2:
Beginning from Jerusalem,
Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009, p. 645), but this is probably incorrect. Greek preserves the same distinction as does English between “a lordly supper”—
kuriakon deipnon
—and “the Lord’s supper”—
deipnon
tou Kuriou; Paul uses the former. According to Hyam Maccoby in
The Mythmaker
(New York: Harper and Row, 1986, 116), “The same expression was used in the mystery religions for the sacred meals dedicated to the saviour-god.... The early Fathers of the Church became embarrassed by it, and they substituted for it the name ‘Eucharist,’ which had Jewish rather than pagan associations. Thus the Fathers
sought to align the Christian ceremony with the non-mystical, non-magical
Kiddush
of the Jews, in which the wine and the bread were ‘blessed’ (or, more accurately, God was blessed for providing them).”

200
1 Corinthians 15:5—8.

201
Eusebius,
Quaestiones ad Marinum,
available online in Greek and French at
http://www2.unil.ch/cyberdocuments/pratique/acces/theologie/theses_theologie.html
as pdf attached to thesis by Claudio Zamagni.

202
The practice began following a decree of the Roman emperor Elagabalus before his death in A.D. 222. The earliest known record of Jesus’ birthday being celebrated on December 25 dates to 243. See Wikipedia entry on Sol Invictus.

203
Chadwick,
Early Church,
25, footnote.

204
Patricia Crone,
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987), 204.

205
Jonathan P. Berkey,
The Formation of Islam
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40.

206
Hugh Kennedy,
The Great Arab Conquests
(Philadelphia: Perseus Books, 2007), 83.

207
Yehuda D. Nevo and Judith Koren,
Crossroads to Islam
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 234.

208
David B. Cook, “Islam: Age of Conquest,” in
Encyclopedia of Religion and War,
ed. Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez (London: Routledge, 2004), 203.

209
Patricia Crone and Michael Cook,
Hagarism: The Making of the Islamic World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 23.

210
Patricia Crone, “What Do We Actually Know about Mohammed?”
www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/mohammed_3866.jsp
August 30, 2006.

211
G. R. Hawting, “John Wansbrough, Islam, and Monotheism,” in
The Quest for the Historical Muhammad,
ed. Ibn Warraq (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 522.

212
Al-Bukhari, quoted in Bernard Lewis,
Islam,
vol. 2 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2.

213
John Wansbrough, “Res Ipsa Loquitur: History and Mimesis,” lecture reprinted in
The Sectarian Milieu
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2006), 162.

214
John Wansbrough,
Quranic Studies
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004 [first published 1977]), 179.

215
Estelle Whelan, “Forgotten Witness: Evidence for the Early Codification of the Qur‘an,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
118 (1998): 1-14.

216
Nevo and Koren,
Crossroads to Islam,
248.

217
Nevo and Koren,
Crossroads to Islam,
279.

218
Crone,
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam,
203—30; quoted in Ibn Warraq, “Studies on Muhammad and the Rise of Islam,” in
The Quest for the Historical Muhammad,
ed. Ibn Warraq (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 29.

219
Ibid.

220
Nevo and Koren,
Crossroads to Islam,
230.

221
Whelan, “Forgotten Witness:’

222
Volker Popp, ”The Early History of Islam, Following Inscriptional and Numismatic Testimony,” in
The Hidden Origins of Islam,
ed. Karl-Heinz Ohlig and Gerd-R. Puin (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Press, 2009), 35-36, 62.

223
Christoph Luxenberg, ”A New Interpretation of the Arabic Inscription in Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock,” in Ohlig and Puin, eds.,
The Hidden Origins of Islam
, 131—32.

224
Karl-Heinz Ohlig, ”Why ‘Shadowy Beginnings’ of Islam?“, in ibid., 10.

225
Philip Jenkins, The
Lost History of Christianity,
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 193.

226
Luxenberg, “New Interpretation,” 143.

227
Ibid.

228
Napoleon A. Chagnon,
Yanomamo,
5th ed. (Florence, Kentucky: Wadsworth, 1997), 76.

229
Max Weber,
The Sociology ofreligion
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 1.

230
This account of the Kula exchange is based on Bronislaw Malinowski,
Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(Long Grove, Illinoi
s: Waveland Press, 1984 [first published 1922]).

231
Ibid., 83.

232
Details of this picturesque male fantasy would doubtless tire most readers, so are relegated to this footnote: Malinowski writes (223), ” ... Kaytalugi is aland of women only, in which no man can survive. The women who live there are beautiful, big and strong, and they walk about naked, and with the bodily hair unshaven (whic
h is contrary to the Trobriand custom). They are extremely dangerous to any man through the unbounded violence of their passion. The natives never tire of describing graphically how such women would satisfy their sensuous lust, if they got hold of some luckless, shipwrecked man. No one could survive, even for a short time, the amorous yet brutal attacks of these women. The natives compare this treatment to that customary at the
yousa,
the orgiastic mishandling of any man, caught at certain stages of female communal labour in Boyowa. [Malinowski here refers to the report that men who disturbed women ritually weeding their gardens in the south of the main Trobriand island were liable to be raped and otherwise abused by the women.] Not even the boys born on this island of Kaytalugi can survive a tender age. It must be remembered that the natives see no need for male co-operation in continuing the race. Thus the women propagate the race, although every male needs must come to an untimely end before he can become a man.”

233
Marcel Mauss,
The Gift
(London : Routledge, 1990), 37.

234
Mary Douglas, Foreword to ibid., ix.

235
Roy A. Rappaport, ”The Sacred in Human Evolution,”
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics
2 (1971): 23-44.

236
Robert Bellah, “The R Word,”
Tricycle: The Buddhist Review,
Spring 2008.

237
Oliver Goodenough and Monika Gruter Cheney, in
Moral Markets,
ed. Paul J. Zak (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), xxiii.

238
E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer
Religion (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 192.

239
Ibid., 17-18.

240
www.http:avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
.

241
Will Herberg,
Protestant Catholic Jew
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 84.

242
Stephen E. Ambrose,
Eisenhower,
vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 38.

243
Francis Fukuyama,
Trust
(New York: Free Press, 1995), 7.

244
Ibid., 319.

245
Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003), 172.

246
Renee RoseShield,
Diamond Stories
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002), 1.

247
www.sec.gov/investor/pubs/affinity.htm
.

248
Robin Pogrebin, ”For Jews, Madoff’s Scandal Brings Feelings of Betrayal and Shame,”
New York Times,
December 24, 2008, 1.

249
Richard Sosis, ”Does Religion Promote Trust? The Role of Signaling, Reputation and Punishment,”
Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion
1 (2005): article 7.

250
Deuteronomy 23:20; Luke 6:35; Koran, Surah 2:275.

251
Marc Hauser,
Moral Minds
(New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 421.

252
Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 227.

253
Deuteronomy 13:8-10.

254
Sam Harris,
The End of Faith
(New York: Norton, 2006), 15-18.

255
Christopher Hitchens,
god Is Not Great
(New York: Hachette, 2007), 106.

256
http://come-and-hear.com/kethuboth/kethuboth_61.html/
.

257
Vernon Reynolds and Ralph Tanner,
The Social Ecology of Religion
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 69.

258
Ibid., 38-39.

259
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, U.S.
Religious Landscape Survey 2008,
68. Available online at
http://religions.pewforum.org/
.

260
Samuel Huntington,
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 265.

261
RodneyStark,
The Rise of Christianity
(New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 128.

262
Paul Johnson,
A History of Christianity
(New York: Simon &Schuster, 1976), 141.

263
Gregory Clark,
A Farewell to Alms
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 99-102.

264
Erik Eckholm, ”Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find New Help,”
New York Times,
September 7, 2007, A1.

265
J. B. Peires,
The Dead Will Arise
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 99.