A Quote by John Shelby Spong
The trouble with Christianity was that by about 150, there were hardly any Jews left in the Christian church, and so from that time until the last part of the twentieth century, the only people reading the gospels and interpreting the gospels and writing commentaries on the gospels were gentiles who were simply ignorant of the Jewish background, and I just thought they were prejudiced.
Related Quotes
All archaeologists in Israel and Palestine make use of the New Testament Gospels. They do this because the Gospels exhibit verisimilitude. In short, the Gospels help archaeologists know where to dig and they help archaeologists understand what they unearth. The 2nd-century Gospels and Gospel-like writings rarely exhibit verisimilitude, so archaeologists rarely appeal to them.
The Gospels were not thought of as works of literature. People were not concerned with the literary reputation of Matthew or Mark, but with the substance of their records of our Lord's life. They did not have to respect their actual words, as they would if they were transcribing the works of Thucydides or Plato.
I've said to others that there were places I had forgotten about that were just so powerful. I've read the Gospels many times, but it's been a while since I've read through a whole book.
I've said to others that there were places I had forgotten about that were just so powerful. I've read the Gospels many times, but it's been a while since I've read through a whole book
The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible.
Beyond the earliest days of the religion, early Christians were believers because they'd been converted, not because they were witnesses to supernatural events, just like today. The 9/11 hijackers believed in Paradise for martyrs, but that doesn't mean that that's true. We have no good reason to imagine that eyewitnesses wrote the gospels rather than someone simply documenting the Jesus story as it had developed within their church community.
For nearly 2,000 years, most people assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and his disciples were the four gospels in the New Testament.
Christ desires his mysteries to be published abroad as widely as possible. I would that [the Gospels and the epistles of Paul] were translated into all languages, of all Christian people, and that they might be read and known.
If the Gospels were truly the pattern of God’s activity, then defeat was only the beginning.
The crime of liberation theology was that it takes the Gospels seriously. That's unacceptable. The Gospels are radical pacifist material, if you take a look at them . . . Liberation theology, in Brazil particularly, brought the actual Gospel to peasants. They said, let's read what the Gospels say, and try to act on the principles they describe. That was the major crime that set off the Reagan wars of terror.
I grew up pretty secular. I went to public school, and all the Jews that I knew, none of them were religious. While probably half of my friends were Jewish, they were all secular Jews. We went to Hebrew school, we knew we were Jewish, but it wasn't a major part of our existence.
The stories about the life and teachings of Jesus were mainly told in Greek, the original language of the gospels.
The New Testament was not produced as a single work issued by an authoritative Church for the instruction of its members. The four Gospels were composed in different times and places over perhaps a third of a century, and for a time circulated separately among a number of other narratives of our Lord's life (of which the newly discovered fragment of an unknown gospel may have been one).
Every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions.
The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.
Scripture is vast, and people can pick and choose what they emphasize, and so for hundreds of years verses that said that you are to welcome the stranger, that with Christ there's neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, we've broken down the dividing wall with the original church, where Christians were first called Christian was the church of Antioch in which for the first time you had Jews, Gentiles of all different ethnicities come together as one people. That's when they were called Christians.
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