Quotes About Gospels

Though in our day we are more than a little obsessed with exact times and sequences, ancient writers were often less linear in worldview and, consequently, actual events were sometimes listed in an order consistent with a theme as opposed to chronologically. Such is the case in the Gospels when Matthew and Mark placed this emotionally charged exchange before Jesus' flogging and John positioned this exchange after the flogging.5

I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.

The search for inventive ways of telling the tale of Christ's birth has been going on a long time; in a way, difference was there from the start with Luke and Matthew.

Far from being an aberration that is not representative of Christianity, the persecution of heretics follows logically from the connection of faith and salvation as presented by Jesus in the Gospels.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

Jesus and Satan appear here as repre sentatives of two opposite principles. Satan is the representative of material consumption and of power over nature and Man. Jesus is the representative of being, and of the idea that not-having is the premise for being. The world has followed Satan's principles, since the time of the gospels.

The spirit of the Gospels is the all inclusive love of Jesus, which jumps off the pages.

The synoptic Gospels suggest that the entire Jewish council, the Sanhedrin, met on the first night of Passover to determine Jesus's fate—this would be tantamount to gathering all the members of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House press corps together late on Christmas Eve to debate a minor case of law. If

Salvation was palpable. So, too, for the Gospels, the message of salvation, the good news, must be more than a postmortem fate. Salvation also occurs in the here-and-now.

we should be able to look at nature as part of God's creation, as given to us in trust, as testifying to the divine while it is not itself divine. We get all this and more when we look at the nature miracles the Gospels record. Each one tells us something about Christ, but each one also tells us something about understanding the Scriptures of Israel, and each one also tells us something about ourselves.

we should resist the tendency, which is part of the rhetoric of the Gospels and their reception, to associate disability with sin.

None of the canonical Gospels provides an explicit date of composition. Paul, who likely died during Nero's persecution of Christians in Rome in 64 ce, never mentions the Gospels, and most scholars agree that the canonical Gospels postdate him.

we have no complete narrative of Jesus' life that existed at the time of Paul, and there may have been none. Thus, Paul's epistles demonstrate some knowledge of what Jesus said and did, and Paul did have contact with some of Jesus' original followers such as Peter and John (see Gal 2), but Paul does not appear to know the Gospels

The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.

I have taken the liberty of quoting at length throughout from the gospels of the Emperor penguins. To them I owe a special debt of gratitude for their remarkable patience.

The ferociously radical-to-the-death Jesus of the Gospels was transformed here into a bland cheerleader for socially acceptable niceness. That made no sense to me. No one ever got himself crucified for organizing a charity golf tournament.

if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.

Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That's concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened 'once upon a time.

No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life... no man can deny the fact that Jesus existed, nor that his sayings are beautiful.

Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.

We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.

There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all.

In dreams, as in the Gospels, one usually possesses the gift of tongues.

All India is full of holy men stammering gospels in strange tongues; shaken and consumed in the fires of their own zeal; dreamers, babblers and visionaries: as t has been from the beginning and will continue to the end. Followed the usual aimless babble that every low-caste native must raise on every occasion. Swiftly - as Orientals understand speed - with long explanations, with abuse and windy talk, carelessly, amid a hundred checks for little things forgotten.