Quotes from Darrell L. Bock

Sixth is a factor related to the last two: the way Christianity is taught in many university religious study programs.Certain narrow perspectives reign on many campuses almost without any expression of alternative viewpoints.

Eighth is yet another new phenomenon: the appeal of public-square crossover novels.

The danger can be that just as we have sought to control our environment, with both its advances and its increased pace, we may seek to control spirituality by making its pursuit or its simplicity the point, rather than its effectiveness in meeting human need.

Tenth is the cultural desire to acknowledge religious diversity in such a way that peace can be maintained and the question of whether one religious tradition has more to offer than another is ignored.

He contends that Jesus had a human mother and a human father (someone other than Joseph). Jesus also had five siblings, including four who became members of his self-selected "council of the twelve," whom we know as the twelve apostles.

In hermeneutics, this phenomenon is called preunderstanding—the understanding one has about a subject before researching it, or the understanding one has about what a text is probably saying before one begins to study it.5

What seems less than likely is that John and Jesus preached a two-Messiah view. There is no evidence for it in any Christian materials (or even in sources that some argue go back to John the Baptist's circles).

Notice that Tabor assumes Jesus couldn't have been resurrected. He was simply reburied by some unknown figure, and the idea that he was resurrected inexplicably emerged later.

For Muslims, Jesus is seen as the messianic prophet they have claimed him to be. Islamic portraits of Jesus are said to parallel Q, James, and the Didache. Thus, we have a Jesus dynasty offered to a world in need of a less contentious religious history and engagement. Once again we have Jesusanity, not Christianity.

he speaks most prominently of the "royal" law (James 2:8), which he defines as the commandment "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." This is a central concept Paul also presents in Galatians 5:14, saying, "For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, 'You must love your neighbor as yourself.

Ehrman responded,"Yes, I think this is a real danger, and it is the aspect of the book that has apparently upset our modern-day apologists who are concerned to make sure that no one thinks anything negative about the Holy Bible. On the other hand, if people misread my book—I can't really control that very well" (Williams 2006).

In fact, what is amazing about this find is that scholars of every stripe—conservative Christians, liberal Christians, believers in Judaism, and secular Jewish scholars—agreed en masse that the special had missed the mark and hadn't come close to making its case.

In order to work, the Jesus tomb hypothesis has to claim that the disciples died for something they knew was a lie—in fact, something they themselves had fabricated. Further, it has to acknowledge that none of the disciples defected, even when faced with suffering and horrible deaths, including stoning and crucifix-ion. Is that likely?

Many, if not most, theological liberal scholars have backgrounds as fundamentalists or evangelicals.

Today the debate over that memory has morphed into two fundamentally different stories about Jesus: Christianity and Jesusanity.

The study noted that most students preferred the description they gave three years after the event rather than the initial account they gave immediately after the event. His point in citing the study was to say that memory becomes distorted over time.

The analogy was that those who followed Jesus paid a great price for their belief. Their families probably disowned them. Many even lost their lives for their faith. They likely would have been marked by such an event, and thus their memory was likely to be better.

This difference over memory parallels the way Jesus is remembered and discussed today.

God has vindicated Jesus.

Others argue that Jesus' presence and teaching were so powerful that they were well remembered by people who were used to passing on teaching orally. In many ways, this book is about that debate. It is a debate that rages in our culture as people speak about who Jesus was and what he taught.

Easter is God's 'yes' to Jesus against the powers who killed him" (2006, 205; italics in original).

One story is Christianity; the other is best described as Jesusanity. It is an important difference, because Jesus is a very distinct figure in each story and, as a result, often inspires people in quite diverse ways.

The central idea of Christianity is the claim that Jesus is the Anointed One sent from heaven.

Christianity involves the claim that Jesus was anointed by God to represent both God and humanity in the restoration of a broken relationship existing between the Creator and his creation.