Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time Quotes

“For Jesus, compassion was more than a quality of God and an individual virtue: it was a social paradigm, the core value for life in community. To put it boldly: compassion for Jesus was political.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“We can see that growth by arranging the gospel material chronologically, from earlier to later writings. As the decades passed, the early Christian movement increasingly spoke of Jesus as divine and as having the qualities of God, a development”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“The image of Jesus I have sketched in the preceding chapters is quite different from the popular image of Jesus, the Jesus many of us have met before. His own self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about believing in him. Rather, he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew, and into a community whose social vision was shaped by the core value of compassion. Naturally, this image of Jesus leads to a quite different image of the Christian life, many of whose characteristics have already been identified.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“the Christian life is about entering into a relationship with that to which the Christian tradition points, which may be spoken of as God, the risen living Christ, or the Spirit. And a Christian is one who lives out his or her relationship to God within the framework of the Christian tradition.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“Moreover, the longer I studied the Christian tradition, the more transparent its human origins became. Religions in general (including Christianity), it seemed to me, were manifestly cultural products.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“Importantly, for Paul "life under the law" is not simply to be equated with "life under the Torah." That is, the problem was not with the Torah as such, but with a way of being that sought to be
"okay" before God through the fulfillment of requirements, be they many or few. Christians sometimes misunderstand this, thinking that the problem was that the Torah had the wrong requirements, and then substituting Christian requirements in-stead. When this happens, "life under the law" remains.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“What kind of world is it in which a Samaritan -a heretic and impure person - can be "good" indeed be the hero of a story? What kind of world is it in which a Pharisee-typically viewed as righteous and pure- can be pronounced unrighteous and an outcast can be accepted? What kind of world is it in which riding a donkey can be a symbol of king-ship, in which purity is a matter of the heart and not of external boundaries, in which the poor are blessed, the first are last and the last first, the humble exalted and the exalted humbled?”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“The issue is no longer believing that Jesus was literally the Son of God, but appreciating the richness of meaning suggested by the multiplicity of Christological images. He was “the Son,” yes, but also the incarnation of the Word, which was also the Wisdom of God. He was the Son of God, the logos of God, and the Sophia of God.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“Selfishness seldom has to do with reaching for the biggest piece of cake on the plate; rather, it is preoccupation with our selves.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“5.  One text, though, does speak of a man’s “womb” being moved: Genesis 43.30.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“Anthropologically speaking, they are delegates of the tribe to another layer of reality, mediators who connect their communities to the Spirit.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“52.  See Sandra M. Schneiders’s interview on the multiplicity and metaphoricity of images for God in the Bible: “God Is More than Two Men and a Bird,” U.S. Catholic, May 1990, pp. 20-27. I find her title especially illuminating.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“Our culture’s secular wisdom does not affirm the reality of the Spirit; the only reality about which it is certain is the visible world of our ordinary experience. Accordingly, it looks to the material world for satisfaction and meaning. Its dominant values are what I call the three A’s–achievement, affluence, and appearance. We live our lives in accord with these values, with both our self-worth and level of satisfaction dependent upon how well we measure up to these cultural messages.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“For some people, the central life issue is not sin and guilt, but bondage to or victimization by one Pharaoh or another. For them, what does the message of sin and forgiveness mean? Unfortunately, it often comes to mean "You should forgive the person who is victimizing you," when what the victim needs to hear is "It is not God's will that you be in bondage to that (or any) Pharaoh." Or if the central problem is alienation and meaninglessness, the message the person needs to hear is "It is not God's will that you remain in Babylon, not God's will that you mourn in lonely exile there.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith

“His own self-understanding did not include thinking and speaking of himself as the Son of God whose historical intention or purpose was to die for the sins of the world, and his message was not about believing in him. Rather, he was a spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet, and movement founder who invited his followers and hearers into a transforming relationship with the same Spirit that he himself knew, and into a community whose social vision was shaped by the core value of compassion.”
― Marcus J. Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith