Quotes About Jesus

Simply put, the infancy narratives in the gospels are not historical accounts, nor were they meant to be read as such. They are theological affirmations of Jesus's status as the anointed of God. The descendant of King David. The promised messiah.

there is no mistaking the tension that exists in the gospels between how the early church viewed Jesus and how Jesus seems to view himself.

The Jesus that is uncovered in the process may not be the Jesus we expect; he certainly will not be the Jesus that most modern Christians would recognize. But in the end, he is the only Jesus that we can access by historical means. Everything else is a matter of faith.

Such statements are commonplace in John, the last of the four canonized gospels, composed between 100 and 120 C.E. John shows no interest at all in Jesus's physical birth, though even he acknowledges that Jesus was a "Nazarean" (John 18:5–7). In John's view, Jesus is an eternal being, the logos who was with God from the beginning of time, the primal force through whom all creation sprang and without whom nothing came into being (John 1:3).

Contrary to Christian conceptions, the title "Son of God" was not a description of Jesus's filial connection to God but rather the traditional designation for Israel's kings.

Jesus called himself "the Son of Man.

Either the threat posed by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful of Jews to have the opportunity to stand before Pilate and answer for his alleged crimes, or else the so-called trial before Pilate is pure legend. There is reason to suspect the latter.

Yet if one wants to uncover what Jesus himself truly believed, one must never lose sight of this fundamental fact: Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His

is possible that Jesus had some basic knowledge of Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire (ironically, Latin was the language least used in the lands occupied by Rome), enough perhaps to negotiate contracts and deal with customers, but certainly not enough to preach. The only Jews who could communicate comfortably in Greek were the Hellenized Herodian elite, the priestly aristocracy in Judea, and the more educated Diaspora Jews, not the peasants and day laborers of Galilee.

The choice for the early church was clear: either Jesus was just another failed messiah, or what the Jews of Jesus's time expected of the messiah was wrong and had to be adjusted

The plaque the Romans placed above Jesus's head as he writhed in pain—King of the Jews—was called a titulus and, despite common perception, was not meant to be sarcastic. Every criminal who hung on a cross received a plaque declaring the specific crime for which he was being executed. Jesus's crime, in the eyes of Rome, was striving for kingly rule (i.e., treason), the same crime for which nearly every other messianic aspirant of the time was killed.

That he came from this tightly enclosed village of a few hundred impoverished Jews may very well be the only fact concerning Jesus's childhood about which we can be fairly confident.

Since September 11, 2001, however, we can no longer rest comfortably with such domesticated pictures of Jesus. We can no longer ignore the impact of Western imperialism on subordinated peoples and the ways in which peoples whose lives have been invaded sometimes react. The coincidental historical analogy is too disquieting, that is, that the Roman Empire had come to control the ancient Middle East, including Galilee and Judea, where Jesus operated.

Jesus was not content to derive his ethics from the scriptures of his upbringing. He explicitly departed from them. [...] Since a principal thesis of this chapter is that we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

Notwithstanding his somewhat dodgy family values, Jesus' ethical teachings were—at least by comparison with the ethical disaster area that is the Old Testament—admirable; but there are other teachings in the New Testament that no good person should support. I refer especially to the central doctrine of Christianity: that of 'atonement' for 'original sin'. This

if Jesus really was born of a virgin, Joseph's ancestry is irrelevant and cannot be used to fulfil, on Jesus' behalf, the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah should be descended from David.

megachurch televangelists with their mansions and Lear jets, preaching a 'Jesus wants you to be rich' gospel of self-interest

Jesus was a loyal Jew. It was Paul who invented the idea of taking the Jewish God to the Gentiles. Hartung puts it more bluntly than I dare: 'Jesus would have turned over in his grave if he had known that Paul would be taking his plan to the pigs.' Hartung

we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is the mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus.

Jesus' healings are not supernatural miracles in a natural world. They are the only truly 'natural' things in a world that is unnatural, demonized and wounded.

May God keep us from benign admiration of Jesus rather than true love and adoration for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings appeared justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God, and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine.

people derived their faith in Jesus from the experience of living together in a close-knit, minority community that challenged the unequal distribution of wealth and power