Outraged by the selling of indulgences, the German monk Martin Luther posted 95 Theses on the door of the Catholic Church in Wittenburg in 1517. At that time, the process was a form of debate and public communication. After hearings and trials five years later, he was excommunicated by the Pope. Because of the controversy, he was forced to go into hiding. He took that opportunity to translate the Bible into German. He also published other volumes, which with the invention of the printing press, spread quickly across Europe. In his later years, he became increasingly bitter and anti-semitic. He assumed a very narrow view that the Jews, rather than the Romans, killed Jesus.

I belong to a group that has been studying the Bible for more than 20 years, so we have gotten to know each other’s opinions. In recent years we have used the videos of Dr. “Mickey” Efird, former professor in the Divinity School at Duke. One of his phrases is my favorite. “Don’t get lost in the weeds.” That is his Southern style of saying that we should not debate minor points that have little to do with the messages of the scriptures.

Both Muslims and Christians honor the Jewish Bible (Old Testament) as part of their origin story. We separated with the Quran and the New Testament with the stories of our leaders. But the history of conflict between us is a long one, spanning more than 1,400 years. It involves a lot of factors other than just religion. It’s marked by periods of intense warfare and as well as times of peaceful coexistence and intellectual exchange.

It started with the capture of Jerusalem by the Muslims in 638, when Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The Most infamous period is the Crusades: Beginning in 1095 and continued until 1492 with the fall of Granada to the Christians. The Ottoman Turks conquered the Orthodox Christian Center in Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453.