Quotes about Gospels

Thus, whether on the large scale — where Jesus as Messiah stands in for Israel, and hence (because of Israel's representative status in God's purposes) for the world — or on the small scale, with individual moments, the point is rammed home by all four gospels. It is not either 'victory' or 'substitution'. The victory is won by Jesus dying the death of the unrighteous.

The second speaker contributing to what we hear the gospels saying is the one that enables us to hear the story of Jesus as the story of Israel's God coming back to his people as he had always promised.

Christians have assumed that virtually the only point in Jesus's death was "to save us from our sins," understood in a variety of more or less helpful ways. But for the gospels themselves, that rescue of individuals (which of course remains a central element) is designed to serve a larger purpose: God's purpose, the purpose of God's kingdom.

Some people, including some who wanted to think of themselves as followers of Jesus, took exactly that line. We can watch the process taking place in the so-called Gnostic gospels (books like the Gospel of Thomas).

The gospels] are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks.

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.

In the biblical view the issue is not modern versus postmodern. Both these views are partly right, and both are finally wrong. Nor is it rational argument versus story, or reason versus imagination. In fact it is not either-or at all. The deep logic of God's truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.

The deep logic of God's truth can be expressed in both stories and arguments, by questions as well as statements, through reason and the imagination, through the four Gospels as well as through the book of Romans.

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.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

Then I studied theology in college, and when I was getting a Ph.D. in literature, I took courses in New Testament studies and studied Greek versions of the Gospels.

Absolute ideals and absolute grace: after learning that dual message from Russian novelists, I returned to Jesus and found that it suffuses his teaching throughout the Gospels and especially in the Sermon on the Mount.