"When we take [Jesus's] sayings and distill from them our doctrines, what we have really done is manipulate his sayings for our own purposes, first of all, for the purpose of avoiding his personal address to us. Without realizing it, we reclassify his sayings as objective teachings to which we can give intellectual assent, rather than letting them strike home as the personal challenge he intended them to be. The issue is not what we think about them, but rather what we do about them." - James Robison ; The Gospel of Jesus: A Historical Search for the Original Good News
"He was one of the greatest teachers humanity has ever had . . . he belongs not solely to Christianity, but to the entire world; to all races and people." - Mahatma Gandhi ; What Jesus Means to Me
"My reading has also been taken in some activist Christian circles to suggest that Jesus rejected most aspects of his own Jewish culture, which could not be further from the truth. The awful legacy of Christian supersessionism dies hard; if I were to revise this book I would take more care to stress all the ways in which Mark's Jesus draws upon his heritage, particularly that of the eight-century prophets." - Ched Myers ; Binding the Strong Man
"The problem is that we have ascribed to [Jesus] a different gospel from what he himself envisaged! We have put him on a pedestal and worshiped him, rather than walking in his footsteps. Put somewhat differently: we must work our way back through the church’s own familiar gospel and its domestication of the gospel of Jesus. Only then do we strike upon what he really had to say, which was a brittle, upsetting, comforting, challenging gospel." - James Robinson ; The Gospel of Jesus: A Historical Search for the Original Good News
"The Bible may be put to the purposes of the comfortable, and perhaps never more so than in these early days of the twenty-first century, when the preaching of the comfortable by the comfortable, to and for the comfortable, floods every inspirational television and radio station in the world. The gospel, however, the radical words of Jesus properly understood in their full transformative power, is another story. If we understand the gospel aright, we too might be prepared to take violent action against Jesus and any who are bold enough to translate what he says into practice." - Peter J. Gomes ; The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus
"The first passion of Jesus was the kingdom of God, namely, to incarnate the justice of God by demanding for all a fair share of a world belonging to and ruled by the covenantal God of Israel. It was that first passion for God’s distributive justice that led inevitably to the second passion by Pilate’s punitive justice." - Borg, Marcus J.; Crossan, John Dominic ; The Last Week
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” - Luke ; Luke 4:18-19
"This text [Sermon on the Mount] represents the distillation of the entire Jewish prophetic vision and supplies the ethical core and centre for all Christianity. We must not ignore, domesticate, sanitize, or censure this Magna Carta of our faith." - Ron Dart ; Spirituality and Justice: the Vision of the Beatitudes