Dethroning Jesus Quotes

“SO WE SEE THAT THERE ARE MORE COMPELLING REASONS TO view the Jesus story as confirmation of the roots of Christianity from its early sources than there is proof of a well-rooted Jesusanity in this earliest period.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Mark “had neither heard the Lord, nor had he followed him”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“This oral tradition took the form of doctrinal summaries, hymns, and sacraments that underscored the fundamental theology of the church”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Even James speaks of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory (James 2:1). The point of naming such a wide variety of books is to illustrate how widespread this teaching was.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“The hymns Paul uses in Philippians 2:5–11 and Colossians 1:15–20 celebrate a Jesus who participates in creation and who is the Redeemer seated above all other spiritual forces.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“The second story is about a great religious figure, one who surely belongs in any religious hall of fame but whose role is more that of instructor and confronter than that of Savior and mediator of salvation. Here is why we speak of “Jesus dethroned.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“That is why the question of enthroning or dethroning Jesus is so important. Might our spiritual quest to find God be tied to which Jesus leads us and where?”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“However, the documentary reveals how far people will go to try to make Christianity into Jesusanity;”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“What our assessment of the Jesus tomb hypothesis has shown is the danger of publicity-driven efforts that aren’t carefully checked.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“In order to work, the Jesus tomb hypothesis has to claim that the disciples died for something they knew was a lie—in fact, something they themselves had fabricated. Further, it has to acknowledge that none of the disciples defected, even when faced with suffering and horrible deaths, including stoning and crucifix-ion. Is that likely?”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“In fact, what is amazing about this find is that scholars of every stripe—conservative Christians, liberal Christians, believers in Judaism, and secular Jewish scholars—agreed en masse that the special had missed the mark and hadn’t come close to making its case.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“All of our earliest sources (what historians are supposed to rely on the most) show that Jesus was seen as a unique, exalted figure—not the first in a line of rulers, but the Son of God.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“When Paul saw the exalted Jesus and was converted, he had to have known the church’s teaching in order to understand the experience.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“he speaks most prominently of the “royal” law (James 2:8), which he defines as the commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is a central concept Paul also presents in Galatians 5:14, saying, “For the whole law can be summed up in a single commandment, namely, ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“For Muslims, Jesus is seen as the messianic prophet they have claimed him to be. Islamic portraits of Jesus are said to parallel Q, James, and the Didache. Thus, we have a Jesus dynasty offered to a world in need of a less contentious religious history and engagement. Once again we have Jesusanity, not Christianity.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Notice that Tabor assumes Jesus couldn’t have been resurrected. He was simply reburied by some unknown figure, and the idea that he was resurrected inexplicably emerged later.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“What seems less than likely is that John and Jesus preached a two-Messiah view. There is no evidence for it in any Christian materials (or even in sources that some argue go back to John the Baptist’s circles).”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“He contends that Jesus had a human mother and a human father (someone other than Joseph). Jesus also had five siblings, including four who became members of his self-selected “council of the twelve,” whom we know as the twelve apostles.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Easter is God’s ‘yes’ to Jesus against the powers who killed him” (2006, 205; italics in original).”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“God has vindicated Jesus.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Jesus’ meal practice was about inclusion in a society with sharp social boundaries.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“The result again is that the christological point of the passage goes missing, attributed to alternate influences. Christianity becomes Jesusanity, but only because the passage’s teaching has been divided and conquered.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“In other words, where Borg and Crossan stress the critique of large political structures with the values of justice and nonviolence, Jesus’ teaching appears to address the local structures of relation-ships, neighbors, and manner of worship before God, while under-scoring love of one’s neighbor and calling for just treatment of others.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“However, Jesus’ stress in his teaching was a reorientation of the heart before God, as opposed to the expression of these ideas in as raw a political form as their work suggests”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“According to Borg and Crossan, the way to understand Jesus’ riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey is to appreciate the story of Jerusalem. Key to this story is the role of the city as the “center of the domination system”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“The first is “divide and conquer.” Here related themes are split apart from each other and isolated so one is early and another is late. The second principle is that “difference equals either disagreement or a distinct theology,” so we can again lift out and separate what goes back to Jesus and what the church came to say later.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“At the same time, we noted that a number of scholars have tried to make more out of Thomas than this document can bear.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“First, this sayings gospel lacks a narrative substructure and therefore lacks verifiability. Second, Thomas is singled out as the only one who has reliable information about Jesus (see especially the prologue and saying 13).”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Finally, the Gospel of Thomas lacks what we might call an “incarnational perspective.”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ

“Ehrman responded,“Yes, I think this is a real danger, and it is the aspect of the book that has apparently upset our modern-day apologists who are concerned to make sure that no one thinks anything negative about the Holy Bible. On the other hand, if people misread my book—I can’t really control that very well” (Williams 2006).”
― Darrell L. Bock, Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture's Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ