Zealot: The Life And Times Of Jesus Of Nazareth Quotes
"One could not help but hear the voice of God."
"The child grew into a blameless man. The man became the Christ."
"His death was the point of it all, for his sacrifice freed us all from the burden of our sins."
"In Iran, my religion and my ethnicity were mutual and linked."
"The sudden realization that this belief is patently and irrefutably false, left me confused and spiritually unmoored."
"I began to rethink the faith and culture of my forefathers."
"The more I learned about the historical Jesus, the more I was drawn to him."
"Two decades of research into Christianity made me a more genuinely committed disciple of Jesus of Nazareth."
"The Jesus that emerges from this historical exercise bears little resemblance to the image of the gentle shepherd."
"Crucifixion was a punishment that Rome reserved almost exclusively for the crime of sedition."
"The notion that the leader of a messianic movement could have remained uninvolved in the revolutionary fervor that had gripped nearly every Jew in Judea is simply ridiculous."
"This book is an attempt to reclaim the Jesus of history, the Jesus before Christianity."
"The real Jesus no longer matters. We should focus instead on Jesus the Christ."
"The great Christian theologian Rudolf Bultmann liked to say that the quest for the historical Jesus is ultimately an internal quest."
"What set the members of the Fourth Philosophy apart from the rest was their unshakable commitment to freeing Israel from foreign rule."
"To be zealous for the Lord was to walk in the blazing footsteps of the prophets and heroes of old."
"The Kingdom of God was at hand. Everyone was talking about it."
"The tribute was particularly offensive as it implied that the land belonged to Rome, not God."
"To be voluntarily tallied like sheep was, in Judas’s view, tantamount to declaring allegiance to Rome."
"Rome itself was to blame for its mismanagement and severe overtaxation of the beleaguered population."
"The Romans, in response, dispatched an army to lop off Theudas’s head and scatter his followers into the desert."
"Rome was in turmoil. Civil war was tearing through the capital."
"Jesus was crucified by Rome because his messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine."
"John promised the Jews who came to him a new world order, the Kingdom of God."
"Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head."
"Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit shall not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come."
"The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected."
"The first shall be last and the last shall be first."
"You have received without payment; give without payment."
"Blessed are you who are poor, for the Kingdom of God is yours."
"The Kingdom of God is a call to revolution, plain and simple."
"The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."
"The sole weapon he had with which to build the Kingdom of God was the one used by all the messiahs who came before or after him, the same weapon used by the rebels and bandits who would eventually push the Roman empire out of the city of God: zeal."
"If anyone else preaches a gospel contrary to the gospel you received frommefrom mefromme, let him be damned."
"For I give over to you the first things which I myself accepted, that Christ died for the sake of our sins, according to the scriptures; that he was buried and that he rose again on the third day, according to the scriptures; that he was seen by Cephas SimonPeterSimon PeterSimonPeter, then by the Twelve."
"The resurrection is not a historical event. It may have had historical ripples, but the event itself falls outside the scope of history and into the realm of faith."
"In Jerusalem, the city he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor."
"Even the Jewish authorities praised James for his rectitude and his unshakable commitment to the law."
"For although James was, as everyone attests, a zealous devotee of the law, he was also a faithful follower of Jesus."
"According to the early Christian historian Hegesippus, the Jewish authorities repeatedly asked James to dissuade people from calling Jesus messiah."
"Their entreaties went unheeded, for James would never betray the legacy of his elder brother, not even when martyred for it."
"The story of James’s death in Josephus’s Antiquities is the earliest nonbiblical reference to Jesus."
"James was more than just Jesus’s brother. He was the undisputed leader of the movement Jesus had left behind."
"James's role as head of the Christian community confirms his significant influence in early Christianity."
"The epistle of James reflects his passionate concern with the plight of the poor."
"James's fierce judgment of the rich may explain why he drew the ire of the greedy high priest Ananus."
"James’s views were in clear agreement with Jesus on the role and application of the Law of Moses."
"James's epistle was likely conceived as a corrective to Paul’s preaching."
"James’s leadership over the Jerusalem assembly came to an end in 62 C.E., when executed for defending the poor and weak."
"Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem was almost exclusively a gentile religion; it needed a gentile theology."
"Two thousand years later, the Christ of Paul’s creation has subsumed the Jesus of history."
"The memory of Jesus the revolutionary is almost completely lost to history."
"Jesus of Nazareth—Jesus the man—is as compelling and praiseworthy as Jesus the Christ."
"The early Church father Clement of Alexandria claims Jesus imparted secret knowledge to James the Just."
"The New Testament confirms James’s role as head of the Christian community."
"Dynasty was the norm for Jews of Jesus's time, crucial for a messianic movement like Jesus's."
"James's steady leadership over the Jerusalem assembly continued until his execution in 62 C.E."
"Once again this seems like a classic case of scholars refusing to accept an obvious reality that does not fit into their preconceived Christological conceptions of who Jesus was and what Jesus meant."
"The question of where Jesus’s views fell on the most decisive issue of the day, which also happened to be the fundamental test of zealotry: Should the Jews pay tribute to Rome?"
"Those scholars who paint Jesus’s answer to the religious authorities as apolitical are, to my mind, totally blind to the political and religious context of Jesus’s time."
"This moment does not mirror some inner experience that Jesus had at the time; it mirrors the desire of the first-generation Christian church."
"The implication is that Jesus stayed in the wilderness for a long time."
"His task is to restore Israel to glory and destroy its enemies, not heal the sick and cast out demons."
"The presence of dissonance gives rise to pressures to reduce or eliminate the dissonance."
"The fact is that we cannot be certain whether the Essenes lived at Qumran."
"Control of the Church passed together with the Apostles, to the brother of the Lord James, whom everyone from the Lord’s time till our own has named the Just."
"James’s epistle is addressed to 'the Twelve Tribes of Israel scattered in the Diaspora.'"
"Bruce Chilton believes the reference to Jesus as the Nazarean is a corruption of the term Nazirite."
"The community that followed James referred to itself as the Ebionites, or 'the Poor,' in honor of James’s focus on the poor."
"The Ebionites viewed Jesus as just a man, well into the fourth century."
"After the Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., Pauline Christianity became the orthodox religion of the Roman Empire."