I think the best way to view the Gospels is to view them as a magnificent portrait being painted by Jewish artists to try to capture the essence of a God experience that they believe they had with Jesus of Nazareth.
I believe in one God, the first and great cause of goodness. I also believe in Jesus Christ, the rebirth of the world. I also believe in the Holy Ghost, the comforter.
Give me your crown, Jesus. Give me your cross, your thorns, so that I may bleed. But give me life, because I have more to do for this country and these people.
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?
Jesus was not born in a manger in central Pennsylvania. He was a man of color. And the fact that we have represented him for centuries literally as a white man speaks to the entire history of white supremacy.
When you make a mistake and the devil comes and tells you 'You're no good,' you don't have to take on the guilt and condemnation he wants to put on you. No! You can immediately confess your mistake to God, thank Him for forgiving you and cleansing you with the blood of Jesus, and move forward in the victory of His grace and forgiveness.
Jesus Christ was God's revenue officer.
Wouldn't you like to have heard the voice of Shakespeare, or Jesus Christ?
I don't have a problem believing in God and Jesus. But in Genesis one has to wonder about these sentences that just go on and end without finishing. The thought is unfinished. Where did Adam go? What is he doing? Hello? There has to be some pages missing.
Every religious pioneer, including Jesus Christ, was persecuted by his contemporaries. But once people understand me, their turn can be dramatic like Saint Paul's.
I'm a classic Church of England member, but part of its strength is the fact that it doesn't ask us to sign up to too much of a canon... but I've always found the teachings of Jesus and the Bible quite useful as a sort of handy guide.
I had a dream that my dad passed away and that Jesus came into the room and he was basically knocking on my door, saying, 'Hey, you need to find out more about me.' So that Sunday morning I ended up going to church, and that's when I got saved.
I was freeborn according to the flesh; I am born of a father who was a decurion, but I sold my noble rank - I blush not to state it, nor am I sorry - for the profit of others. In short, I am a slave in Christ to a foreign nation for the unspeakable glory of the eternal life which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
It's pretty easy for me to say that the most important thing in my life is my relationship with Jesus Christ, followed by my relationship with family. And football's later on down the line.
If Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, and He did die on a cross at a point of time in history, then, for all history past and all history future it is relevant because that is the very focal point for forgiveness and redemption.
When Jesus then is with the multitudes, He is not in His house, for the multitudes are outside of the house, and it is an act which springs from His love of men to leave the house and to go away to those who are not able to come to Him.
I the chief of sinners am, but Jesus died for me.
But however long you may have continued in rebellion, and how ever black and long the catalog of your sins, yet if you will now turn to God by a sincere repentance, and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, you shall not be cast out.
Neither Muslims nor anyone else truly worships the true God if they reject Jesus as he really is in the Gospels.
Religion kept some of my relatives alive, because it was all they had. If they hadn't had some hope of heaven, some companionship in Jesus, they probably would have committed suicide, their lives were so hellish.
For thirty years, Jesus never allowed his divinity to manifest itself. He was infinitely superior to everyone but never showed it.
But to make a holiday record that involves favorite American songs and then also get to sing about Jesus birth, it just seemed like a real easy, subtle way to combine a couple of things that I love.
I never really liked the Gospel of John because I never could find the humanity of Jesus in it. I thought it presented Jesus as a visitor from another planet; in addition, John's gospel is and has been interpreted as a document that fuels anti-Semitism in the church.
A lot of what I've done as Nine Inch Nails has been governed by fear. I was trying to keep the songs in a framework that was tough, and I learnt a lot from Jesus and Mary Chain about how to bury nice pop songs in unlistenable noise - the idea being if you can get behind that wall, you find there's a pearl inside.
There's an inclination to get on the inside of Jesus' psyche, and I think that's a deep mistake because it assumes that what you have here is someone analogous to us.
We didn't really swallow much of the Jesus thing, but we got the vocab.
We are Jesus Christ's; we belong to him. But even more, we are increasingly him. He moves in and commandeers our hands and feet, requisitions our minds and tongues. We sense his rearranging: debris into the divine, pig's ear into silk purse. He repurposes bad decisions and squalid choices. Little by little, a new image emerges.
I like Muhammad a lot, because he's like us more than anybody else. Jesus is just so exalted, and Buddha is just so exalted, it's almost beyond our reach.
My parents would have their friends over - their friends who thought, 'How can you live without a TV?' By the time they left, they understood why, because I had done the second act of 'West Side Story' and the first act of 'Jesus Christ Superstar,' playing all the parts. In many ways, that's what I'm still doing. I'm just getting paid better.
Whatever our creed, we stand with admiration before the sublime character of Jesus.
The story of Jesus is very fascinating. It still has such a tremendous power, even after 2,000 years! We don't really know if he existed as a historical figure.
Normally, if someone's legacy will outlast their life, it's apparent when they die. On the day when Alexander the Great, or Caesar Augustus, or Napoleon, or Socrates, or Muhammad died, their reputations were immense. When Jesus died, his tiny, failed movement appeared clearly at an end.
I love to perform, to give glory to God with my own brand of funky gospel music. I think it's my mission to show people that God, that Jesus, can be cool.
We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.
The founding document of the United States of America acknowledges the Lordship of Jesus Christ because we are a Christian nation.
We believe with all the strength of our spirit that mankind has a supreme, primary and irreplaceable need which can be satisfied only through Jesus Christ, the first-born among men, the head of the new humanity, in whom each individual reaches full self-realization.
