Quotes About Gospels

these sources were not intending to present what we think of as historically accurate information; that's a modern imposition on these Gospels that they can't bear.

In my view, the early Christian Gospels are so much more than historical sources. They are memories of early Christians about the one they considered to be the most important person ever to walk the planet.

We call these books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John because they are named after two of Jesus's earthly disciples, Matthew the tax collector and John the beloved disciple, and two of the close companions of other apostles, Mark the secretary of Peter and Luke the traveling companion of Paul.

Acts is theological history, while the Gospels are theological biographies, i.e., biographies written with a theological agenda.

In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.

Gospels, Acts, letters, and apocalypses (these are the four literary genres of the New Testament

any stories in the Gospels that do not coincide with what we know the early Christians would have wanted to say about Jesus, or indeed, any stories that seem to run directly counter to the Christians' self-interests in telling them, can stake a high claim to being historically accurate.

The anonymity of the Gospel writers was respected for decades. When the Gospels of the New Testament are alluded to and quoted by authors of the early second century, they are never entitled, never named.

I was raised in a Catholic school, and I would always go to church on Sunday, and I would hear the same music over and over and over and over again, same gospels, hymns, everything.

Digging into the creation of the Puritan mind-set involved really trying to wrap my head around extreme Calvinism and what that's all about. I now understand predestination, and I had to read the Geneva Bible cover-to-cover and read the gospels quite a bit to get into that world.

Fred Meuser writes, "Luther deeply loved Jesus - the beautiful, caring, human Jesus of the Gospels. Any sermon that failed somehow to hold up that Lord - whose love reached its pinnacle in his self-giving on the cross - so that others could be amazed, as he had been, and then be drawn to trust in the promises and find peace with God and with self, could not be described as preaching Christ."40

So far as I can remember there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.

I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him as His chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.

And always, in our highly regularised way of life, he is obsessed by thoughts of the morrow. Of all the precepts in the Gospels the one that Christians have most neglected is the commandment to take no thought for the morrow. If a man is prudent, thought for the morrow will lead him to save; if he is imprudent, it will make him apprehensive of being unable to pay his debts. In either case the moment loses its savour. Everything is organised, nothing is spontaneous.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

Reading and rereading this collection, I encounter the generosity, frailties and strengths, contradictions and contributions of "disappeared" rebels and heretics, of prophets and soldiers and healers. I am reminded of the noncanonical Gnostic Gospels suppressed by state religion; the heart of this work seems to pulse with the Gospel of Thomas (113): The disciples said to Him, "When will the Kingdom come?" [Jesus said,] "It will not come by waiting for it.

According to the Gospels, Jesus did not tell his listeners to believe whatever they wished to believe as individuals, or to follow him only in their private thoughts and interior sentiments but not in concrete, public, shared human life.

The Gospels were written to present the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that would be appropriate to different readerships, and for that reason are not all the same. They were not intended to be biographies of Jesus, but selective accounts that would demonstrate his significance for different cultures.

For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.

I argue that the resurrection was not the Great Resuscitation. It was a total transformation. I just don't accept the black-and-white thinking that goes along with needing to regard the gospels are literally true.

I believe that Jesus Christ existed and that He died for my sins. And I believe that what He said in the Gospels is a model for the way I should try to lead my life and that I will always fall short of that and, therefore, need Him to redeem me.

The Gnostic Gospels. Vintage: New York, 1989

In the Gospels, being a sinner means being lost ... There is no way for man to escape the condition of being lost ... The lost can only be sought and found.