Quotes from Marcus J. Borg

As a faithful Jew, he would have recited the Shema upon rising and retiring each day, the heart of which affirmed: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the LORD alone. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might

Days pass, and the years vanish, and we walk sightless among miracles. Fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your Presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk. Help us to see, wherever we gaze, that the bush burns, unconsumed. And we, clay touched by God, will reach out for holiness and exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place . . .

Why did it happen? Why did Jesus' life end this way? For centuries, Christians have seen Jesus' death as the very purpose of his life. It was salvific; that is, it had saving significance and makes our salvation possible.

the story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, the story of Jesus becomes a disclosure of God, the revelation and epiphany of God. As a

American Christians need especially to see the political meanings of these stories, for we live in a time of the American empire.

All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God's kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his.

But did Jesus himself see his own purpose this way? According to the gospels in their present form, yes.

empire is not intrinsically about geographical expansion and territorial acquisition. As a nation, that is not our aim. Rather, empire is about the use of superior power—military, political, and economic—to shape the world as the empire sees fit. In this sense, we are the new Rome.

Older than the gospels themselves, this understanding of Jesus' death is central to the letters of Paul. It is also part of Paul's summary of the tradition he received when he became a follower of Jesus: "For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures."4

Thus, a fifth stroke in the sketch. Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God, believing that this kingdom was inaugurated with his own work, summoning others to join him in his kingdom movement, and warning of dire consequences for the nation, for Jerusalem, and for the temple, if his summons was ignored.

In short, I could accept that Jesus saw his own death the way that Tom suggests only if there were very strong historical evidence for it. I find it more historically persuasive, and religiously compelling, to see the purposeful understanding of Jesus' death as post-Easter interpretations, and as history metaphorized, not history remembered.

We do not need to choose between them. Our understanding of Jesus' significance is richer if we see and affirm both the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus. Both the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus are the image of the invisible God. Both disclose what God is like.

we are to participate with God in bringing about the world promised by Christmas.

I see Mark's passion story as the earliest. Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark, and I see the additions that they made to Mark's passion story as imaginative elaborations.30 I have no opinion about whether John's passion story shows knowledge of Mark or whether it is completely independent. Thus I see Mark as the foundational narrative, and I turn now to comments about the main elements of his story of the passion.

In particular, Jesus' clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

Does that make him ordinary? No. I think he is one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived. I don't really care who the other one was—my point is that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility. That's what makes him so remarkable. If he was also divine, then he's not all that remarkable. If he had the knowledge and power of God, he could have done so much more.

Being born again is the work of the Spirit. Whether it happens suddenly or gradually, we can't make it happen, either by strong desire and determination or by learning and believing the right beliefs. But we can be intentional about being born again. Though we can't make it happen, we can midwife the process.

Thus Paul has been used to support systems of cultural conventions oppressive to more than half of the human race. No wonder slaves, women, gays and lesbians, and those who care about them have often found Paul appalling.

God will not change us as individuals without our participation, and God will not change the world without our participation.

The sixth stroke of my sketch is therefore as follows: Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not. His agendas led him into a symbolic clash with those who embraced other ones, and this, together with the positive symbols of his own kingdom agenda, point to the way in which he saw his inaugurated kingdom moving toward accomplishment.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that fear is a more powerful political motive in our society than compassion.

The conflict among Christians about whether or not Jesus was God is grounded in two different understandings of the Gospels—and the New Testament and the Bible as a whole.

Huston Smith's book Why Religion Matters

We can see that growth by arranging the gospel material chronologically, from earlier to later writings. As the decades passed, the early Christian movement increasingly spoke of Jesus as divine and as having the qualities of God, a development