Richard Dawkins Quotes

We use the word 'synoptic' to talk about Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and it really means 'seeing together,' because they all have a similar perspective. Matthew and Luke - whoever wrote those Gospels - used Mark as a focus and as a basic story. So all of them have a lot in common.

The Gospels were written to present the life and teachings of Jesus in ways that would be appropriate to different readerships, and for that reason are not all the same. They were not intended to be biographies of Jesus, but selective accounts that would demonstrate his significance for different cultures.

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.

Paul hardly ever allows the real Jesus of Nazareth to get a word in.

My book centers in on the New Testament, the goal being to help a person who wants to understand the Bible to see how what God did as revealed in the New Testament will reveal to them their own personal story.

The 'New Testament', now, I quite liked. Jesus had a lot of good things to say, and as for his father, he must have been highly thought of by the community to work with wood - a material that couldn't have been widely available in Palestine.

Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.

The early Church had nothing but the Old Testament. The New Testament lies hidden in the Old; the Old Testament lies open in the New.

The Gospel of Judas really has been a surprise in many ways. For one thing, there's no other text that suggests that Judas Iscariot was an intimate, trusted disciple, one to whom Jesus revealed the secrets of the kingdom, and that conversely, the other disciples were misunderstanding what he meant by the gospel.

To the first class belong the Gospels and Acts; to the second, the Epistles; to the third, the Revelation.

The New Testament doesn't present Jesus as a single man to cover up his humanity. It presents him as a single man because... he was a single man.

The Bible is a history book.

The search for inventive ways of telling the tale of Christ's birth has been going on a long time; in a way, difference was there from the start with Luke and Matthew.

When we turn to the New Testament, we find not one single passage at all calculated to disturb the conscience of an honest slaveholder.

That's what we have with the Old Testament and the New Testament: good storytelling.

Jesus is the most normal Christian in the Bible.

The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act.

The New Testament rests itself for credulity and testimony on what are called prophecies in the Old Testament, of the person called Jesus Christ; and if there are no such things as prophecies of any such person in the Old Testament, the New Testament.

All we know about Jesus is what someone else wrote down... so really one should say, "Here is what someone wrote down that they said Jesus said..." this isn't uncertainty on purpose, just plain speaking.

My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document.

Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

Christ's public life extended only over eighteen months, and for this he had silently been preparing himself for thirty - two years.

The New Testament never simply says, "Remember Jesus Christ." That is a half-finished sentence. It says, "Remember Jesus Christ is risen from the dead."