Quotes about Jesus

And it's always a bad move to invent a Jesus who agrees with us rather than challenges us.

It took a while, but the early followers of Jesus began to put the pieces together. Resurrection is a future thing, part of the "world to come." Raising Jesus now meant that the "world to come" was already here—at least a preview of it.

Physical death is the final letting go that we all experience with loved ones and that we will ourselves experience one day. Dying now the way Jesus says to means letting go already of every comfort, familiarity, joy, and sorrow—and of the false sense of control those things give us. Letting go of these things is a dying process. Jesus sounds more like a mystic than an intellectual lining up correct thinking.

The real Jesus can only be truly understood from a later vantage point—interpreted after the resurrection when the broader implications of who Jesus was and what he did could be better grasped. That is the Jesus the Gospel writers give us, each in his own way.

The Gospels are also anonymous, and the names attached to them come to us from early church tradition. Likely none was an eyewitness. The writers relied on stories of Jesus that were circulating orally, perhaps (or probably) going back to what eyewitnesses had seen.

One cannot have contentment in the Christian life without the darkness. Dying is the only path to resurrection, and that is the only way of knowing God. There is no shortcut. Jesus himself is our model for this.

Then we have the Gospel of John, the odd man out. John's story of Jesus is so out of step with the others that it is sometimes hard to see how he could be talking about the same person.

Because, more than the other three Gospel writers, John is big on Jesus's divine authority over the religious leaders. That's part of his agenda, and so he shapes the past to make the point.

This is the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham:

and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom was born Jesus, who is called Christ.

This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged in marriage to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.

She will give birth to a Son, and you are to give Him the name Jesus, because He will save His people from their sins.”