When authors go on book tours one thing they do is visit local bookstores and sign stock so that interested customers can by a copy of their book with the author’s signature. Bookstores put a sticker on the front but the cost of the book remains the same. Often while signing stacks of books a customer will walk up and ask the obvious–Are you the author? Yesterday I was in Powell’s Bookstore in downtown Portland, in town for the annual book fair called Wordstock. If you are ever in Portland you have to visit Powell’s, it is truly one of the great independent bookstores in the United States. Anyway, this customer began to talk to me while I was signing stock and her first question was one I get often–Dr. Tabor, what is your faith?

I am a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, chair of the Department of Religious Studies with over 30 faculty in which we cover the diversity of world religions taught from an academic perspective. Our students often ask us what we “believe” and most of us tell them that such matters are irrelevant to the academic study of religion. Whatever we are teaching, whether Christian Origins, Islam, Hinduism, or even a new religious movement, our goal is to be evenhanded and objective, taking an historical and descriptive approach, not one that involves the confession of any faith. This is different from what goes on in a seminary or theological setting and even some parochial schools that are founded to support education in the context of a specific faith.

Sometimes I have half jokingly replied to my students who ask, “Dr. Tabor what are you?” (they usually mean–are you a Christian?), “I am a human being.” The rabbis have a term for this in Hebrew: Bnai Noach, it means “children of Noah.” According to the Bible all human beings are “children of Adam,” and then later, “children of Noah,” with basic ethical obligations to one another and to animals. I am not sure I would want a label beyond that, even though, like most people, I have my own spiritual perspective. I do, however, say a bit more than this in The Jesus Dynasty. In the Preface I begin with a story of a Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land when I was 14 years old. And in the Conclusion I try to set forth my vision of what a recovery of the mission and message of the historical Jesus might mean for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In the Conclusion in particular one can hear a bit of my inner self in terms of what I believe, even beyond what I generally am comfortable doing with my students, given my Jeffersonian commitment to the free and academic atmosphere in a secular university. This is essentially what I told my inquirer in Powell’s yesterday, and what I generally tell audiences when asked this question while on tour. I autographed a book for her and assured her that she would pick up an overall sense of my own spiritual journey in the way I convey the Jesus story in The Jesus Dynasty.

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