Quotes about Gospels

amen, I tell you: The locution is peculiar to Jesus. The term "amen" would ordinarily respond to the speech of another ("so be it," "yes"), and come at the end. The Gospels show Jesus validating his own speech beforehand; an unmistakable sign of prophetic self-consciousness.

Jesus as a "teacher" is much safer than Jesus as the gospels actually present him.

New creation itself has begun, they are saying, and will be completed. Jesus is ruling over that new creation and making it happen through the witness of his church. "The ruler of this world" has been overthrown; the powers of the world have been led behind Jesus's triumphal procession as a beaten, bedraggled rabble. And that is how God is becoming king on earth as in heaven. That is the truth the gospels are eager to tell us, the

I have argued that the God of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels, can be understood only as God-in-public, and that methods of criticism designed to keep this rumor quiet need to be challenged by appropriate historical, theological, and political critique and replaced by methods that do justice to the reality of the texts and hence do justice - in the much fuller sense - in the public world that the Gospels demand to address.

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.

Take away the stories of Jesus's birth, and all you lose is four chapters of the Gospels. Take away the resurrection and you lose the entire New Testament, and most of the second-century fathers as well.

What the Gospels offer is not a philosophical explanation of evil—what it is or why it's there—but the story of an event in which the living God deals with it

the four gospels are trying to say that this is how God became king. We have, partly deliberately and partly accidentally, forgotten this massive claim almost entirely. Since we cannot stop reading the gospels without ceasing to be proper Christians, we have developed all kinds of strategies for making alternative sense of the gospels and so screening out the dangerous

The point [of the gospels] is not whether Jesus is God, but what God is doing in and through Jesus. What is this embodied God up to?

The gospels were all about God becoming king, but the creeds are focused on Jesus being God.

The theological denigration of women was a major revision of the assumptions that had informed the Christian movement from the gospels forward. Jesus himself modeled an egalitarian respect toward women: In Christ, 'there is neither male nor female.

When 'biblical' theologies ignore the gospels, something is clearly very wrong." (on atonement theories)