Quotes About Gospels

Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go.

The Gospels and the rest of the New Testament reflect the life of Jesus, what it means for us & what it means for the world.

We cannot always analyse intimacy; but there is no mistaking it: we know the person quite differently. You do not learn intimacy, or reap the fruit of someone else's. You grow into it. In the Gospels one really can grow into this intimacy with Our Lord, precisely because the evangelists do not obtrude their own personalities. Anyhow, know Him we must.

I am no theologian. I am a layman. I am among those who are preached to, and who listen. It is not for me to preach. I should not willingly forego being a listener, a man who reads the Gospels and then listens to what others say that our Lord meant. But sometimes a listener speaks out, and listens to his own voice.

I am completely in agreement with you that Christ is no longer—in the Gospels—an unrevealed scapegoat. It's the opposite: now he is spoken of openly as the scapegoat! Therefore I am completely in agreement with your phrase: "Even if Christ is our scapegoat, he is not that of the Father, and the sacrificial understanding is always relative, while the absolute is that which is beyond all sacrifice."174

A text structured by the scapegoat effect cannot make a theme of this; [and in turn] a text that makes a theme of the scapegoat cannot be structured by this effect. In the gospels, Christ is so obviously the scapegoat of everyone [in the text] that he can no longer be the scapegoat of the text, just as the sixteenth-century witch isn't the scapegoat of the twentieth-century historian.

The earliest surviving texts of this new religion are not Gospels but letters, those of Paul deriving from the 50s CE, twenty years or so after Jesus' crucifixion.

The problem is that, slowly but surely across the past two hundred years of scholarly research, we have learned that the gospels are exactly what they openly and honestly claim they are. They are not history, though they contain history. They are not biography, though they contain biography. They are gospel—that is, good news. Good indicates that the news is seen from somebody's point of view—from, for example, the Christian rather than the imperial interpretation.

The Gospels did not start the Church; the Church started the Gospels. The Church did not come out of the Gospels; the Gospels came out of the Church.

Heard in full sound, the Gospels tell about the establishment of a theocracy, and portray what theocracy looks like with Jesus as king.

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation.

the real message of the Gospels is not a mere description of a state of affairs, but rather an invitation to taste and see how good is the Lord!, to "come and behold the wondrous deeds of God" (Psalms 46:8).

As I have argued elsewhere, we actually know more securely that Jesus of Nazareth was a Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God than we know almost anything about the history of traditions that led up to the production of the gospels as we have them.5

Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized. Both statements are foundational to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins, and both need explaining

Paul is our earliest New Testament author. All of his genuine letters were written before any of the gospels; his earliest ones are from around the year 50, and they predate Mark by about twenty years. Yet Paul says relatively little about the historical Jesus, so he is not a major source.

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

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

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.

Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized.

To shift to a voice metaphor, the gospels contain two voices: the voice of Jesus and the voice of the community. Both layers and voices are important. The former tell us about the pre-Easter Jesus; the latter are the witness and testimony of the community to what Jesus had become in their experience in the decades after Easter.5

Mutually incompatible theories abound as to where, when, and why the synoptic gospels came to final form.

Nothing would please us more than to see our beloved children form the habit of reading the Gospels - not merely from time to time, but every day.

I've said to others that there were places I had forgotten about that were just so powerful. I've read the Gospels many times, but it's been a while since I've read through a whole book.

I would be cautious in embracing or rejecting doctrines. Had they been essential to our salvation, they would have been more explicitly declared in the Gospels, where we are so well taught the practice of every good word and work.