Quotes About Jesus

Within three hundred years Jesus went from being a Jewish apocalyptic prophet to being God himself, a member of the Trinity. Early Christianity is nothing if not remarkable. HEAVEN

How did Jesus understand and describe himself? Did he talk about himself as a divine being? I will argue that he did not.

Jesus had been exalted to heaven and made to sit at the right hand of God as his unique Son.

Jesus's half brother James, who in this account is the son of Joseph from a previous marriage.

fundamental question: Did Jesus and his disciples teach an orthodoxy that was transmitted to the churches of the second and third centuries?

John's is the only Gospel in which Jesus is explicitly identified as divine. To be sure, he is called the Son of God in all the Gospels. But to ancient Jews, being the "son of God" did not make a person God; it made the person a human being in a close relationship with God, one through whom God does his will on earth.

how Jesus came to be considered God. The short answer is that it all had to do with his followers' belief that he had been raised from the dead.

The very first surviving account of Jesus's life was written thirty-five to forty years after his death. Our latest canonical Gospel was written sixty to sixty-five years after his death. That's obviously a lot of time.

In it, the man Jesus is showered with divine favors beyond anyone's wildest dreams, honored by God to an unbelievable extent, elevated to a divine status on a level with God himself, sitting at his right hand.

The exaltation (of Jesus by crucifixion) is not to a higher state than the one he previously possessed, as in Paul. For John, he was already both 'God' and 'with God' in his preincarnate state as a divine being.

The Christian religion is founded on the belief that Jesus was raised from the dead. And it appears virtually certain that it was Mary Magdalene of all people, an otherwise unknown Galilean Jewish woman of means, who first propounded this belief. It is not at all farfetched to claim that Mary was the founder of Christianity.

every biblical projection of when and how Jesus will return has been incontrovertibly proven to be flat-out wrong by the relentless march of history.

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.

only two people known by name were also called "Son of God." One was the Roman emperor—starting with Octavian, or Caesar Augustus—and the other was Jesus. This is probably not an accident. When Jesus came on the scene as a divine man, he and the emperor were in competition.

Jesus says, "You have heard it said, 'Whoever divorces his wife should give her a certificate of divorce' [a command found in Deut. 24:1], but I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife for reason other than sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery." It is hard to see how one can follow Moses' command to give a certificate of divorce, if in fact divorce is not an option.

Moreover, this earlier tradition has a different view of Christ than the one that Paul explicates elsewhere in his surviving writings. Here, unlike in Paul's writings ... the idea that Jesus was made the Son of God precisely at his resurrection is also stressed.

No, what made Jesus different from all the others teaching a similar message was the claim that he had been raised from the dead.

It is because in John's Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus's words; they are John's words placed on Jesus's lips.

the followers of Jesus (most of them? all of them?) came to believe that Jesus was physically raised from the dead. That belief is a historical fact.

Evidence that Jesus really did think that he was the king of the Jews is the very fact that he was killed for it.

It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and "of the same essence" as the Father.

God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus.

It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God's honor and worship.

that infamous cry that has led to such hateful acts of anti-Semitism over the ages, where they take responsibility for the death of Jesus and pass that responsibility on to their descendants: "His blood be upon us and our children" (27:25).