Quotes from Kenneth E. Bailey

The prayer for our bread includes the neighbors. It is our Father and our bread.

The more familiar we are with a biblical story, the more difficult it is to view it outside of the way it has always been understood. And the longer imprecision in the tradition remains unchallenged, the deeper it becomes embedded in Christian consciousness. The birth story of Jesus is such a story.

Jesus was raised by an extraordinary mother who must have had enormous influence on his attitudes toward women.

Christian faith is fact, but not bare fact; it is poetry, but not imagination. Like the arch which grows stronger precisely by dint of the weight you place upon it, so the story of the Gospels bears, with reassuring strength, the devotion of the centuries to Jesus as the Christ. What is music, asked Walt Whitman, but what awakens within you when you listen to the instrument? And Jesus is the music of the reality of God, and faith is what awakens when we hearken.ls

Dodd was able to point out that no one would have crucified an itinerant preacher who went around encouraging people with general moral principles.

A British journalist once asked Mother Teresa how she kept going, knowing that she could never meet the needs of all the dying in the streets of Calcutta. She replied, "I am not called to be successful; I'm called to be faithful.

People with differences can work together if they have the same purpose. Paul wants all of them to think along the same lines, and to have a united purpose.

Jesus does not eat with sinners to celebrate their sin. He does so to celebrate his grace.

In the kingdom of God, barking orders at others is not an acceptable way to try to solve problems created by our inadequacies.

The idea that the early Christian tradition was limited to its Greek and Latin expressions is still widespread. This assumption distorts historical reality and weakens greatly our understanding of the roots of Christian theology and spirituality. In the third and fourth centuries Syriac was the third international language of the church. It served as the major means of communication in the Roman diocese of the East, which included Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia.

In every culture the total word of God has to be declared to us by another. In every culture the message of the gospel is in constant danger of being compromised by the value system that supports that culture and its goals. The stranger to that culture can instinctively identify those points of surrender and call the community back to a purer and more authentic faith. But such infusions of new life are usually resented and resisted.

When you are in total darkness, the tiniest point of light is very bright.

Centuries of high quality Arabic Christian literature remain, for the most part, unpublished and unknown.' All of these sources, Syriac, Hebrew/Aramaic and Arabic, share the broader culture of the ancient Middle East, and all of them are ethnically closer to the Semitic world of Jesus than the Greek and Latin cultures of the West.

In the Lord's Prayer the believer, with the phrase May thy name be made holy, calls for a demonstration of the holiness of God. That is, the worshiper is saying, May God again demonstrate his holiness. This in turn expresses a willingness to participate in Isaiah's dramatic experience.

5. The kezazah ceremony. In the Jerusalem Talmud and elsewhere in the writings of the sages, we are told that at the time of Jesus the Jews had a method of punishing any Jewish boy who lost his family inheritance to Gentiles. Such a loss was considered particularly shameful, and the horror of that shame is reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

If Joseph and Mary were taken into a private home and at birth Jesus was placed in a manger in that home, how is the word inn in Luke 2:7 to be understood? Most English translations state that after the child was born, he was laid in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn. This sounds as if they were rejected by the people of Bethlehem. Was that really the case?