Who Was Jesus? Quotes

“But Christianity makes claims not just at the level of isolated occurrences, but at the level of worldviews. One of the central worldview claims of Christianity, based on the resurrection of Jesus seen in the context of the whole Jewish tradition, is that the creator God was active in and as Jesus to redeem Israel and the world. If that is true, then this is the truth for which all the world has longed, towards which all humanity has dimly been striving. And if that is so, in turn, then it is less surprising than it might otherwise have been to find the early Christians saying that Jesus’ mother remained a virgin at the time of his conception. It is precisely the sort of strange truth which creeps up on you unawares, which takes you by surprise, but which then makes itself at home, fitting in unexpectedly well to the aspirations of Jew as well as of Greek. We cannot ‘prove’ the virginal conception of Jesus to the satisfaction of post-Enlightenment scepticism. But in the light of the resurrection we are called to be sceptical about scepticism itself.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“Jesus is sheer, absolute gift of God. He is not a mere product of human history; he is the humanity of the God who graciously identifies with us and shares our human condition. No less human for that, for God’s solidarity with us requires his full humanity. But human as God’s self-gift to humanity, as ‘Immanuel”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“Right through Israel’s history there had been a sense that, strange though it might seem, the one true God would use this small and apparently insignificant nation as his means of transforming the entire world. This great transforming event would be, finally, the coming of the Kingdom of God.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“So, many have concluded, if Jesus was wrong we must find a way of salvaging something from the wreckage. This is the point at which many writers have turned Jesus into either a moralist (the route Wilson takes) or an existentialist (Bultmann’s route). That is a way of having your cake and eating it: of having Jesus, without the embarrassment of his rather odd views about the immediate future.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“we find Christians straining every nerve to say what they found themselves compelled to say: not that there were now two, or three, different Gods, but that the one true God had revealed himself to be, within himself so to speak, irrevocably threefold. The whole point of the doctrine of the Trinity, both in its early stages in passages like Galatians 4.1-7, 1 Corinthians 12.4-6, 2 Corinthians 13.13, and Matthew 28.19, and in its later stages in the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, was that one could not say that there was a plurality of Gods: only that there was an irreducible threefold-ness about the one God. The Fathers drew on non-Christian philosophical categories, not to invent this belief, but to try to explain it to their contemporaries.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“The Christian doctrine of the incarnation was never intended to be about the elevation of a human being to divine status. That’s what, according to some Romans, happened to the emperors after they died, or even before. The Christian doctrine is all about a different sort of God — a God who was so different to normal expectations that he could, completely appropriately, become human in, and as, the man Jesus of Nazareth. To say that Jesus is in some sense God is of course to make a startling statement about Jesus. It is also to make a stupendous claim about God.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“Jesus is the ‘Word’ of God. Jesus is the Wisdom through which the world was made. Jesus is, in some senses, the new Torah. And, in a move which has stupendous consequences, Jesus is the true Shekinah, the true presence of the one true God, the truth of which the Jerusalem Temple was simply a foretaste.9”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?

“Among other beliefs, I hold more firmly than ever to the conviction that serious study of Jesus and the gospels is best done within the context of a worshipping community.”
― N.T. Wright, Who Was Jesus?