Messiah: Did you mean...?

In the 2nd century CE, as Christianity was in the process of becoming an independent religion, a body of literature emerged that scholars classify as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. Apocrypha (Greek: apokryptein, "to...

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was a German conductor and composer of both innovative late-Romantic and Modernist music. He is best known for his symphonic poems and operas like Salome and Elektra, both of which caused a sensation...

In the canon of the New Testament, the fourth gospel of John is uniquely different from the other three, known as the Synoptics ("seen together"). Mark, Matthew, and Luke have parallel ministries and methods of relating the story...

The Inquisition was the official institution of the medieval Catholic Church that established ecclesiastical judges to investigate and judge divergent opinions and practices that...

The Rites of Eleusis, or the Eleusinian Mysteries, were the secret rituals of the mystery school of Eleusis and were observed regularly from c. 1600 BCE - 392 CE. Exactly what this mystic ritual was no...

As a youngster, David (the later king of Israel), slew Goliath, a giant, who was the champion of Israel’s enemy, the Philistines. "David and Goliath" became a metaphor for an underdog who nevertheless is victorious over a more...

The siege of Khartoum from March 1884 to January 1885 was the most dramatic episode of the Mahdist War (1881-99) in Sudan when an army led by the inspirational Muslim leader, Muhammad Ahmad, the self-proclaimed...

The estimated expanse of the Achaemenid Empire at its height c. 500 BCE was two million square miles. Most of this territory was conquered by Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Empire, who reigned from 559 to 530 BCE...

The Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898 saw General Kitchener lead an Anglo-Egyptian-Sudanese army to victory over 50,000 Mahdists in Sudan. The death of General Gordon during the...

Titus Flavius Josephus (36-100 CE), the Jewish historian, is the main source for understanding Second Temple Judaism in the 1st century CE. In the last decades of the 1st century CE, he wrote The Jewish War, the Antiquities...