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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our glamorized representations of Jesus say more about us than about him.
the Gospels present a man who has such charisma that people will sit three days straight, without food, just to hear his riveting words. He seems excitable, impulsively “moved with compassion” or “filled with pity.”
Jesus lived out an ideal for masculine fulfillment that nineteen centuries later still eludes most men.
People of his day tended to keep rabbis and “holy men” at a respectful distance, but Jesus drew out something else, a hunger so deep that people crowded around him just to touch his clothes.
Contemporary teachers strove to “not impose24 a restriction upon the community unless the majority of the community will be able to stand it.” Jesus had no such reticence. He broadened murder to include anger, adultery to include lust, theft to include coveting.
(Interestingly, the demons never failed to recognize him as the “holy one of God” or “son of the Most High”; it was human beings who questioned his identity.)
it is the very ordinariness of the disciples that gives me hope.
Jesus had the ability to offer his audience lasting, even eternal rewards.
Christians have grown so comfortable that we no longer identify with the humble conditions Jesus addressed in the Beatitudes — which may explain why they sound so strange to our ears.
The disciples seemed utterly incapable of faking a resurrection or risking their lives by stealing a body; nor did it occur to them in their state of despair.
Interesting we did not try to take things into our own hands.
According to all four Gospels, women were the first witnesses of the resurrection, a fact that no conspirator in the first century would have invented.
the Gospels do not present the resurrection of Jesus in the manner of apologetics,
the soldiers who had seen proof of the resurrection with their own eyes changed their story to a lie,
anyone who saw the resurrected Jesus lost the freedom of choice to believe or disbelieve.
He insisted on associating himself with a term that everyone seemed to misunderstand. What did Jesus mean by the kingdom of God?
