The Meaning of Jesus Quotes

“Jesus died for our sins” has been understood. Among some Christians, it is seen as an essential doctrinal element in the Christian belief system. Seen this way, it becomes a doctrinal requirement: we are made right with God by believing that Jesus is the sacrifice. The system of requirements remains, and believing in Jesus is the new requirement. Seeing it as a metaphorical proclamation of the radical grace of God leads to a very different understanding. “Jesus died for our sins” means the abolition of the system of requirements, not the establishment of a new system of requirements.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Other prophets, other messiahs, came and went in Jesus’ day. Routinely, they died violently at the hands of the pagan enemy. Their movements either died with them, sometimes literally, or transformed themselves into a new movement around a new leader. Jesus’ movement did neither. Within days of his execution it found a new lease of life; within weeks it was announcing that he was indeed the messiah; within a year or two it was proclaiming him to pagans as their rightful Lord. How can a historian explain this astonishing transformation?”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“But the claim does mean that for us, as Christians, Jesus is the decisive revelation of God, and of what a life full of God is like. Indeed, I see this as the defining characteristic that makes us Christian rather than something else.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“To see Jesus as “the Wisdom of God” and “Son of God” and “messiah” means to take very seriously what we see in him as a disclosure of God.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“If they mean, “Do you think Jesus saw his own death as a sacrifice for sin?” or “Do you think that God can forgive sins only because of Jesus’ sacrifice?,” my answer is no. But if they mean, “Is the statement a powerfully true metaphor of the grace of God?,” then my answer is yes. Let me explain.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Older than the gospels themselves, this understanding of Jesus’ death is central to the letters of Paul. It is also part of Paul’s summary of the tradition he received when he became a follower of Jesus: “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.”4”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Why did it happen? Why did Jesus’ life end this way? For centuries, Christians have seen Jesus’ death as the very purpose of his life. It was salvific; that is, it had saving significance and makes our salvation possible.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Paul is our earliest New Testament author. All of his genuine letters were written before any of the gospels; his earliest ones are from around the year 50, and they predate Mark by about twenty years. Yet Paul says relatively little about the historical Jesus, so he is not a major source.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“The change in my worldview has made it possible for me once again to take God seriously. I am convinced that the sacred is real.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Moreover, the traditions about Jesus grew because the experience of the risen living Christ within the community shaped perceptions of Jesus’ ultimate identity and significance.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized. Both statements are foundational to the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins, and both need explaining”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“As I follow this path, I discover a Jesus who was not simply an example, even the supreme example, of a mystic or Spirit person, such as one might meet, in principle, in other cultures. I find, rather, the Jesus I have just been describing: Jesus as a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, and indicating in symbolic actions, and in cryptic and coded sayings, that he believed he was Israel’s messiah, the one through whom the true God would accomplish his decisive purpose.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“the use of personal imagery for God correctly affirms that God is known as a deeply personal presence, as a “you,” and not simply as an impersonal force. But when the imagery of supernatural theism becomes a conceptual model for thinking about God’s relationship to the world, it has seriously negative consequences. For many people, it makes the notion of God incredible. Indeed, most modern atheism is a rejection of the God of supernatural theism. It is also theologically deficient: it affirms only the transcendence of God and neglects the immanence of God, despite the fact that the Jewish and Christian traditions have consistently affirmed that God is both.27 Moreover, this theological deficiency matters deeply: affirming only God’s transcendence makes God absent. Mystical experience knows better: God is immanent as well as transcendent, present and not absent. God is the encompassing Spirit in whom we live and move and have our being. God—the sacred—is “right here” as well as “more than right here.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Jewish mystic and Christian messiah describe how I see Jesus before and after Easter. To use language from my previous chapter, I see the pre-Easter Jesus as the former and the post-Easter Jesus as the latter. The affirmation in the title thus also includes an implicit negation. Namely, I am not persuaded that the pre-Easter Jesus thought of himself as the messiah, and so I describe him in nonmessianic categories. Instead of seeing any of the exalted metaphors as reflecting Jesus’ own self-awareness or sense of identity, I see them as post-Easter affirmations. They are the early Christian movement’s witness to what Jesus had become in their experience, not his own testimony about himself. Such language is “history metaphorized,” and in this case it is Jesus himself, his life and his death, who is metaphorized.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“History, then, prevents faith becoming fantasy. Faith prevents history becoming mere antiquarianism. Historical research, being always provisional, cannot ultimately veto faith, though it can pose hard questions that faith, in order to retain its integrity precisely as Christian faith, must struggle to answer, and may well grow strong through answering. Faith, being subject to the vagaries of personality and culture, cannot veto the historical enterprise (it can’t simply say “I don’t like the Jesus you write about, so you must be wrong”), but it can put hard questions to history, not least on the large topic of the origins of Christianity, and history may be all the better for trying to answer them.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“When someone claims to “know” Jesus of Nazareth in this sense, they are making a claim about other things as well: the existence of a nonspatiotemporal world; the existence of Jesus within that world; the possibility of presently alive human beings having access to that world, and of this being actually true in their case. They are claiming, more particularly, to know one person in particular, a distinctive and recognizable person, within that world, and that this person is identified as Jesus. This knowledge is what many people, myself included, are referring to when we say that we know Jesus “by faith.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“A vision of the Christian life that takes Jesus seriously would not be very much concerned with the afterlife. Jesus’ message was not about how to get to heaven. The widespread impression that it was grew, to a large extent, out of a misunderstanding of two phrases in the gospels: the Jesus of Matthew’s gospel regularly speaks about “the kingdom of heaven,” and the Jesus of John’s gospel often speaks of “eternal life.” But both phrases meant something different from what they convey in English. Matthew used “kingdom of heaven” for Mark’s “kingdom of God” because he shared a common Jewish reverential reluctance to use the word God. The phrase thus really means “kingdom of God.” In John, “eternal life” translates a phrase that means “life of the age to come,” not “life in heaven.” Moreover, John sometimes speaks of “the life of the age to come” as a present reality, not simply as a state we can enter into after death.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Life in the Spirit is also life in community. The vision of Jesus is not individualistic, even though of course individuals mattered to him. Like the Jewish tradition in which he stood, he saw the covenant with God as not simply about our relationship to God, but also about our relationship with one another. The community that gathered around him, enacted in his open meal practice, was both symbol and reality: it embodied his inclusive social vision, even as it also met genuine human needs for sustenance and belonging. For us today, life in the community of Jesus nourishes life in the Spirit. Our worship together celebrates and mediates the reality of God, our learning together draws us deeper into the way of Jesus, and our acting together seeks to incarnate “the dream of God,” namely, compassion and justice in the world of the everyday.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“A vision of the Christian life that takes Jesus seriously awakens not only compassion but also a passion for justice. Like those who stood in the Jewish prophetic tradition before him, Jesus knew that the desperation of peasant life flowed from systemic injustice. Destitution and degradation, in his world and ours, are neither natural nor inevitable but are the product of domination systems created and maintained by the rich and powerful to serve their own interests. Such structures are neither ordained by God nor mandated by scarcity.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Through the lens of the Bible we see God. And because the Bible is not just about God, but about the divine-human relationship, through that lens we also see our life with God. To expand the metaphor to the Christian tradition as a whole: the Bible, Jesus, and central postbiblical traditions are a lens through which we see God and our relationship with God. What matters is not believing in the lens but seeing through the lens.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“Thinking of the Christian life as being primarily about believing in God, the Bible, and Jesus is thus a modern mistake, with profound consequences. Beliefs have little ability to change our lives. One can believe all the right things and remain a jerk, or worse. Saints have been heretical, and people with correct beliefs have been cruel oppressors and brutal persecutors. Rather, the Christian life is about a relationship to the God to whom the tradition points. What matters is the relationship, for it can and does and will transform our lives.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“I do not think being a Christian is primarily about believing. It is not about believing in the lens, but about entering a deepening relationship to that which we see through the lens. It is not about believing in the Bible or the gospels or Christian teachings about Jesus, but about a relationship to the One whom we see through the lens of the Christian tradition as a whole.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“No one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn’t. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable. If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed, I do not suppose that my own Christian faith, or that of the church to which I belong, would have been very different.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“No one can prove, historically, that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. No one can prove, historically, that she wasn’t. Science studies the repeatable; history bumps its nose against the unrepeatable. If the first two chapters of Matthew and the first two of Luke had never existed,”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“When I say the creed, I understand myself to be identifying with the community that says these words together. For those of us in creedal churches, doing so is part of our identity. Moreover, I identify not only with the community in the present, but also with generations of long-dead Christians who said these same ancient words as they stood in the presence of sacred mystery. I experience a momentary participation in the communion of saints. Given all of the above, I think we would understand the purpose of the creed better if we sang it or chanted it.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“The cultural relativity of biblical and creedal language struck me with considerable force when I was in South Africa on a lecture trip a few years ago, soon after the official end of apartheid. My schedule included lecturing at a black theological seminary, an interesting learning experience. On the drive back to Pretoria with my white host, I was told that the black church was being encouraged to develop its own creed. The reason? Because the status of “only son” was not a very high status in that particular black culture. One has no access to an “only son”; he is socially isolated. A much higher status was that of “oldest brother.” Thus, if one were to speak of Jesus with the highest status known in that culture, one would speak of him as “our oldest brother” and not as an “only son.” The cultural relativity of creedal and biblical language hit home. To say the obvious, if the creed had been formulated in a different culture, its language would have been very different.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“What is done to the glory of God in the present is genuinely building for God’s future. Acts of justice and mercy, the creation of beauty and the celebration of truth, deeds of love and the creation of communities of kindness and forgiveness—these all matter, and they matter forever.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“The New Testament is full of the promise of a world to come in which death itself will be abolished, in which the living God will wipe away all tears from all eyes. The personal hope for resurrection is located within the larger hope for the renewal of all creation, for God’s new heavens and new earth. Take away the bodily resurrection, however, and what are you left with? The development of private spirituality, leading to a disembodied life after death: the denial of the goodness of creation, your own body included. If Jesus’ resurrection involved the abandoning of his body, it would make exactly the wrong metaphorical point.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions

“The point of the resurrection, for Paul, is that entropy does not have the last word, for humans or for the world as a whole. God has the last word, and it will be lifegiving. Present Christian existence, therefore, with all its pains and struggles, is infinitely worthwhile.”
― Marcus J. Borg, The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions