Quotes About Jesus

For Mark, it is about participation with Jesus and not substitution by Jesus.

Jesus, then, was not just a prophet announcing the kingdom. He believed that the kingdom was breaking in to Israel's history in and through his own presence and work. This is the third layer of my historical portrait of his mission and message.

In short, the portrait of Jesus as a Spirit person is history remembered and not simply history metaphorized. This is the basis for my claim that Jesus was a Jewish mystic: for him, God was an experiential reality. He knew the immediacy of the sacred in his own experience. And this claim leads to a second claim: Jesus' experience of God was foundational for the rest of what he was.

Marcus Borg's book Conflict, Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus.

Jesus was offering forgiveness to all and sundry, out there on the street, without requiring that they go through the normal channels. That was his real offense.

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

Its central elements are seen no longer as going back to the historical Jesus, but as the product of the early Christian movement in the decades after his death. Jesus as a historical figure was not very much like the most common image of him.

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

Moreover, the traditions about Jesus grew because the experience of the risen living Christ within the community shaped perceptions of Jesus' ultimate identity and significance.

To affirm that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God does not require affirming that he is the only, or only adequate, revelation of God. Christians have sometimes thought so.

But the claim does mean that for us, as Christians, Jesus is the decisive revelation of God, and of what a life full of God is like. Indeed, I see this as the defining characteristic that makes us Christian rather than something else.

If we found the decisive revelation of God in the Torah or in the Koran, then we would be Jews or Muslims. But to be Christian is to affirm, "Here, in Jesus, I see more clearly than anywhere else what God is like.

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.

Jesus's vivid experience of the reality of Spirit radically challenges our culture's way of seeing reality.

Why did it happen? Why did Jesus' life end this way? For centuries, Christians have seen Jesus' death as the very purpose of his life. It was salvific; that is, it had saving significance and makes our salvation possible.

the story of Jesus is thus a story of God and us. This does not mean, of course, that the historical Jesus was God. But because the completed story affirms that God was present in and through Jesus, the story of Jesus becomes a disclosure of God, the revelation and epiphany of God. As a

All this means that we can add a fourth stroke to our historical portrait of Jesus. He was a first-century Jewish prophet, announcing God's kingdom, believing that the kingdom was breaking in through his own presence and work, and summoning other Jews to abandon alternative kingdom visions and join him in his.

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

Thus, a fifth stroke in the sketch. Jesus was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing the kingdom of God, believing that this kingdom was inaugurated with his own work, summoning others to join him in his kingdom movement, and warning of dire consequences for the nation, for Jerusalem, and for the temple, if his summons was ignored.

In short, I could accept that Jesus saw his own death the way that Tom suggests only if there were very strong historical evidence for it. I find it more historically persuasive, and religiously compelling, to see the purposeful understanding of Jesus' death as post-Easter interpretations, and as history metaphorized, not history remembered.

We do not need to choose between them. Our understanding of Jesus' significance is richer if we see and affirm both the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus. Both the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus are the image of the invisible God. Both disclose what God is like.

In particular, Jesus' clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

Does that make him ordinary? No. I think he is one of the two most remarkable human beings who ever lived. I don't really care who the other one was—my point is that what we see in Jesus is a human possibility. That's what makes him so remarkable. If he was also divine, then he's not all that remarkable. If he had the knowledge and power of God, he could have done so much more.