Quotes from Darrell L. Bock

Jesusanity is a coined term for the alternative story about Jesus. Here the center of the story is still Jesus, but Jesus as either a prophet or a teacher of religious wisdom. In Jesusanity, Jesus remains very much Jesus of Nazareth. He points the way to God and leads people into a journey with God. His role is primarily one of teacher, guide, and example.

There is no enthronement of Jesus at God's side, only the power of his teaching and example. In this story, the key is that Jesus inspires others, but there is no throne for him. He is one among many—the best, per-haps, and one worthy to learn from and follow.

In one, Jesus is worshipped. In the other, he is simply respected. In one, he is intimately associated with God. In the other, he points to God. In one, he is the Way. In the other, he shows the way. We cannot understand the public discussion about Jesus without understanding that the discussion entails these two distinct stories.

In 1985 E. P. Sanders wrote Jesus and Judaism. In this work, Sanders, who has taught at Duke, Oxford, and Vanderbilt, argues that Jesus was a restoration prophet for Israel.

then Tertullian is saying that several of the original New Testament books still existed in his day, well over a century after the time of their writing.

What our assessment of the Jesus tomb hypothesis has shown is the danger of publicity-driven efforts that aren't carefully checked.

However, the documentary reveals how far people will go to try to make Christianity into Jesusanity;

That is why the question of enthroning or dethroning Jesus is so important. Might our spiritual quest to find God be tied to which Jesus leads us and where?

Approximately five thousand seven hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts are known to exist.

The second story is about a great religious figure, one who surely belongs in any religious hall of fame but whose role is more that of instructor and confronter than that of Savior and mediator of salvation. Here is why we speak of "Jesus dethroned.

Jesus argues that what should be contemplated is not the cutting short of these particular lives, but the fact that life terminates.

it's not what /Ehrman puts into the book that is so troubling but what he leaves out. And what he leaves out is any discussion of the tremendous resources at our disposal for reconstructing the text of the New Testament.

The hymns Paul uses in Philippians 2:5–11 and Colossians 1:15–20 celebrate a Jesus who participates in creation and who is the Redeemer seated above all other spiritual forces.

As New Testament professor Craig Blomberg observes, "What most distinguishes the work [Misquoting Jesus] are the spins Ehrman puts on some of the data at numerous junctures and his propensity for focusing on the most drastic of all the changes in the history of the text, leaving the uninitiated likely to think there are numerous additional examples of various phenomena he discusses when there are not" (2006).

Even James speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory (James 2:1). The point of naming such a wide variety of books is to illustrate how widespread this teaching was.

This oral tradition took the form of doctrinal summaries, hymns, and sacraments that underscored the fundamental theology of the church

Mark "had neither heard the Lord, nor had he followed him

With repentance comes a change of mind that effects a change of direction, since one's orientation of life is directed in faith to God.

The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God and World Affairs (2006).

Twelfth is a brittle fundamentalism that has caused many who came from such a background to eventually grow out of and renounce it.

First, the changes they were experiencing made more and more evident a rigid system of interpreting the Bible, a system that they were quickly outgrowing. So quickly, indeed, that once the dam broke, once they could no longer contain their reading of the Bible within the framework of fundamentalism, there was a flood—and so they moved on. Second

SO WE SEE THAT THERE ARE MORE COMPELLING REASONS TO view the Jesus story as confirmation of the roots of Christianity from its early sources than there is proof of a well-rooted Jesusanity in this earliest period.

These twelve factors explain both the rise of religious discourse today and the ascendancy of a Jesusanity that respects Jesus and his message but domesticates his uniqueness.

When Jesus is made a social revolutionary or a prophet of wisdom, the relationship of creature to Creator is basically reduced to an ethical call that Jesus is said to give people so that they respond to