Quotes About Jesus

What our assessment of the Jesus tomb hypothesis has shown is the danger of publicity-driven efforts that aren't carefully checked.

That is why the question of enthroning or dethroning Jesus is so important. Might our spiritual quest to find God be tied to which Jesus leads us and where?

The second story is about a great religious figure, one who surely belongs in any religious hall of fame but whose role is more that of instructor and confronter than that of Savior and mediator of salvation. Here is why we speak of "Jesus dethroned.

The hymns Paul uses in Philippians 2:5–11 and Colossians 1:15–20 celebrate a Jesus who participates in creation and who is the Redeemer seated above all other spiritual forces.

Even James speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory (James 2:1). The point of naming such a wide variety of books is to illustrate how widespread this teaching was.

SO WE SEE THAT THERE ARE MORE COMPELLING REASONS TO view the Jesus story as confirmation of the roots of Christianity from its early sources than there is proof of a well-rooted Jesusanity in this earliest period.

When Jesus is made a social revolutionary or a prophet of wisdom, the relationship of creature to Creator is basically reduced to an ethical call that Jesus is said to give people so that they respond to

Lessing's ditch, which argues for a canyon between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith

A divorce between these texts and Jesus means we see only a shadow of the real Jesus or even a distortion of him.

between Jesus and history or between Jesus and the witness of his followers within history.

It is the divorce between Jesus' entire message and the practice of the church.

Dethroning Jesus seeks to determine whether we have the right to get to that kind of a discussion or whether Lessing's ditch is so great that we should simply throw up our hands and do the best we can to muddle through.

In sum, our book is a look at the tale of two stories and a consideration of whether one or the other story places us closer to the real Jesus, closer to our Creator, and, as a result, closer to ourselves.

What should not be missed is that both Mack and Sanders share a nonmessianic Jesus, one who is teacher, not messiah. This makes them both holders of Jesusanity

The first is "divide and conquer." Here related themes are split apart from each other and isolated so one is early and another is late. The second principle is that "difference equals either disagreement or a distinct theology," so we can again lift out and separate what goes back to Jesus and what the church came to say later.

What Schüssler Fiorenza and Horsley share is a strong emphasis on the prophetic elements of Jesus' teaching that cause us to view people differently. Once again Jesus as teacher is underscored, not Jesus as deliverer.

According to Borg and Crossan, the way to understand Jesus' riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey is to appreciate the story of Jerusalem. Key to this story is the role of the city as the "center of the domination system

Crossan's view of Jesus sounds very familiar as a result of our survey. Jesus was a Jewish cynic peasant with an alternative social vision.

What these writers share to one degree or another is the recognition that Jesus' message was tightly rooted to his Jewishness and operated in a more messianically inclined direction, pushing them into the Christianity side of the spectrum.

However, Jesus' stress in his teaching was a reorientation of the heart before God, as opposed to the expression of these ideas in as raw a political form as their work suggests

It is this significant disjunction between the Jesus-as-prophet view and Jesus' disciples' claim that Jesus is the Christ that makes Jesusanity's view of Jesus so difficult to accept historically. But we are jumping ahead.

In Jesusanity, it is Jesus' teaching that matters and not his person or work beyond the example it sets.

In other words, where Borg and Crossan stress the critique of large political structures with the values of justice and nonviolence, Jesus' teaching appears to address the local structures of relation-ships, neighbors, and manner of worship before God, while under-scoring love of one's neighbor and calling for just treatment of others.

One contributing factor is the plethora of books about Jesus from this perspective since the 1980s. Jesus studies is a growth industry today.