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Are you religious yourself?

I would say yes, but in the sense that I am endlessly fascinated with the unknowability of what it means to be human, to exist at all. Or as Martin Heidegger asked, why is there something rather than nothing? There's no answer to that. And yet it hovers behind all of our other answers as an enduring question. For me, it puts a kind of miraculous glow on the world and my experience of the world. So in that sense, I am religious.

What about God? If God is defined as some sort of transcendent reality, do you think God exists?

[Laughs] Frankly, no. But there are so many different conceptions of God. Take, for example, the medieval Christian, Jewish and Islamic mystics. It's a very rich period from the 12th to the 15th centuries. They began to realize that in each of their traditions, it was impossible to say exactly who God was and what he wants and what he's doing. In fact, human intelligence has a certain limitation that keeps it from being able to embrace the infinite or the whole. Therefore, every one of our statements about God and the universe is tinged with a degree of ignorance. I would say that I am deeply moved by the thought of an unnameable mystery. If you then ask me, exactly which mystery are you then referring to? I can't answer. That's as far as I can go. But it's got its grip on me, for sure.

Given what's happening in the world right now, do you think there's a lot at stake in how we talk about religion and belief?

Absolutely. In the current, very popular attack on religion, the one thing that's left out is the sense of religion that I've been talking about. Instead, it's an attack on what's essentially a belief system.

Are you talking about atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

Yes. There are several problems with their approach. It has an inadequate understanding of the nature of religion. These chaps are very distinguished thinkers and scientists, very smart people, but they are not historians or scholars of religion. Therefore, it's too easy for them to pass off a quick notion of what religion is. That kind of critique also tends to set up a counter-belief system of its own. Daniel Dennett proposes his own, fairly comprehensive belief system based on evolution and psychology. From his point of view, it seems that everything can be explained. Harris and Dawkins are not quite that extreme. But that's a danger with all of them. To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

You have a provocative view of Jesus. You claim that "the vast literature on Jesus is not about anything; that, in fact, it says nothing." That's hard to swallow, given that we've had 2,000 years of inquiry and debate about who the real Jesus was.

The most difficult part of understanding Christianity is trying to get at who Jesus was. The New Testament writers were very confused about who Jesus was and what he was doing. And during the New Testament era, there was great strife among Christians. They were quarreling with each other over a number of questions. Was Jesus really God? Or was he only appearing to be God? Was he simply a person of such perfect morality that God adopted him? Was he created by God after the creation? Where does he belong in the Trinity, Augustine asked in the early 5th century?

Later on, St. Thomas, the great theologian of the Catholic tradition, understood the church as the historical extension of the incarnation. This is a very radical idea. So you know Jesus not through Scripture and not through some kind of internal experience, but through the existence of the church itself. And then you get Martin Luther, who rejected that idea and said the only way you really get to know Jesus is through Scripture. It couldn't be more different than Thomas' conception. Then you get Calvin, a contemporary of Luther's, who understood Jesus strictly in Old Testament terms, as prophet, priest and king. And then you have Soren Kierkegaard, under the influence of Hegel, who saw Jesus as "the absolute paradox," the eternal and the human combined in one historical moment, which is in fact unintelligible. I call this long history of how Jesus has been understood and interpreted "an abundance of Jesuses."

And we're not even up to the 20th century. You could say this convoluted history is a mess. After all, what are Christians supposed to believe? Or you could say all this passion over competing interpretations reveals the vitality of this religion.

What's striking to me is not that Christians keep disagreeing about these things. They can't stop arguing with each other. The issue doesn't go away. You'd think, we can't settle exactly who Jesus is, so let's forget it. But the subject burns. It holds people's attention and requires some kind of response. I think Christianity is the attempt to answer that very question. And that's why I made what may seem to be an outrageous remark: When you look at the way Jesus has been interpreted over the centuries, it says nothing. What do we actually know about Jesus? Well, there's only one historical contemporary reference to Jesus. That's in the historian Josephus. All he said was that Jesus lived, he was loved by his disciples, and was executed for a crime that Josephus doesn't indicate.

Even the Gospels are not contemporary accounts. They were written after the life of Jesus.

They were written many years later. The earliest is the Gospel of Mark, probably written 35 years after the death of Jesus. The Gospel of John is written anywhere from 60 to 65 years later. They were written by Greeks, not by Jews. These were people who couldn't speak Hebrew. They probably had never even been in Jerusalem, and they certainly did not know Jesus personally. They probably knew no one who knew Jesus personally. So if we have to get down to solid fact, what we have is an illiterate young man, a homeless man, who wandered about the area of Galilee -- a backwater in the Roman Empire -- who taught some things, healed some people, and was executed by the Romans. That's about it in terms of historical verification. That's not much.

Isn't this a point of great contention? Some biblical scholars say Paul's letters were written just 15 to 25 years after the death of Jesus. In Corinthians, Paul refers to hundreds of eyewitnesses who saw Jesus after he rose from the dead. And the author of the Gospel of Luke claims that he got his account of Jesus' life from eyewitnesses who were still alive. Christian scholars point to these accounts as evidence that the story of Jesus is grounded in history, not just myth created long after he died.

It is true that Luke says he's basing his Gospel on the many stories being told. Even more interesting, John closes his Gospel with the remark that if all the stories being told about Jesus were written down, the world could not contain them all. John also gives us a very different Jesus from the other Gospels. Some of Paul's letters are the oldest in the New Testament, written before the Gospels, and Paul does refer to Jesus appearing to 500 witnesses. But Paul has nothing to say about the life of Jesus, not a trace of his teachings or his healings. If we had to rely on Paul for a portrait of Jesus, we would know nothing more than Paul's personal reaction to a mysterious event.