Quotes About Jesus

The four gospels, again in their very different ways, are all written to tell the story of Jesus as the story of Israel, and the story of Israel's God, reaching their proper climax, so as thereby to tell the story of how Israel's God becomes king of the whole world.

Paul's powerful, spirit-driven proclamation of Jesus as "son of God" can hardly be called "preaching," if by "preaching" we mean the sort of thing that goes on in churches week by week in our world. This was a public announcement, like a medieval herald or town crier walking through the streets with a bell, calling people to attention and declaring that a new king had been placed on the throne.

our confidence is not in the solidity of Western culture or the basic goodness of modern democracy. Our confidence is in Jesus and him alone.

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God's kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

If today's, and tomorrow's, church is to engage in this kind of mission, seeking both to implement the achievement of Jesus and his resurrection and thereby to anticipate the final renewal of all things, it must itself be renewed, resourced, and reshaped for this mission.

The best guess has him a little younger than Jesus of Nazareth; a birth date in the first decade of what we now call the first century is as good as we can get. As for

without wondering what it might mean to say that the crucified and risen Jesus was the king of whom Psalm 2 had spoken.

If you want to know what it means to talk about God being 'in charge of' the world, or being 'in control', or being 'sovereign', then Jesus himself instructs you to rethink the notion of 'kingdom', 'control' and 'sovereignty' themselves, around his death on the cross.

This emerges clearly in the gospels, where Jesus's "authority" consists both in healing power and in a different kind of teaching, all of which the gospel writers—and Jesus himself—understood as part of the breaking-in of God's Kingdom.

The New Testament, with the story of Jesus's crucifixion at its center, is about God's kingdom coming on earth as in heaven.

So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann's route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.

His larger position is what we might call messianic eschatology: if Jesus is Israel's Messiah, then Israel's God is regrouping his people around Jesus, just as other first-century messianic movements tried to corral loyal Jews around their central figure.

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the king of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfillment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns. Christianity is based on the belief that it was and is the latter.

In particular, the story Revelation tells is the same story that all four gospels tell, though the church, which has done its best to hush up this fact about the gospels, has not usually recognized the similarity. The four canonical gospels (unlike the so-called gnostic 'gospels'!) tell the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, conquered the power of evil through his death and became the lord of the world.

only when we see Jesus's death in its proper connection to this entire narrative, can we begin to resolve the questions we want to ask about what the early Christians actually meant.

Did Paul "switch religions"? Or can we accept Paul's own account that, in following the crucified Jesus and announcing that Israel's God had raised him from the dead, he was actually being loyal to his ancestral traditions, though in a way neither he nor anyone else had anticipated?

Acts, with its many tales of confrontation, persecution, and martyrdom, takes forward exactly this agenda. This is what it looks like, Luke is saying, when Jesus is enthroned as Lord of the world, and his followers go out to put his royal rule into effect, ending up in Rome announcing God's kingdom and Jesus as Lord "with all boldness, and with no one stopping them" (28:31).

Here, again and again, the evangelists are telling the story of Jesus with an eye, rightly and properly, toward the communities they know will be reading these books as the foundational documents of their corporate life. The needs of the developing church were many and varied, and we can see the four gospels meeting those needs in different ways.

so that the blessing of Abraham could flow through to the nations in King Jesus.

Ultimately, the so-called 'gnostic gospels' would be a denial of what Jesus and the church believed about God himself and what the canonical gospels are inviting the rest of the world, ourselves included, to believe about God. The canonical gospels are saying, in form and overall substance, that the word 'God' properly belongs to the creator God, the God of Israel, the God who has kept his promises to creation and to Israel and has done so in this way.

the gospels are consciously telling the story of how God's one-time action in Jesus the Messiah ushered in a new world order within which a new way of life was not only possible, but mandatory for Jesus's followers.

The resurrection of Jesus is the launching of God's new world.