Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi
However, this story is not the same as the gospel. The gospel fits into this story, but it is not the story. Further, the gospel only makes sense in that story. Now a very important claim: without that story there is no gospel. This leads to a second claim: if we ignore that story, the gospel gets distorted, and that is just what has happened in sa
... See moreDallas Willard • The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited
It does not help very much at all to take each saying, each parable, and work through a multiply hypothetical history of traditions as though aiming thereby to peel the historical onion back to its core. That is the way of tears and frustration, a new form of scholarly exile, reflected in the wild carob-pods of the prodigal, which, being…
Some highl
N. T. Wright • Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God
What then was Jesus talking about? It is time, as I shall argue in detail later on, to reject the old idea that Jesus expected the end of the space-time universe—though this does not mean, as the ‘Jesus Seminar’ has imagined, that Jesus did not use ‘apocalyptic’ language.48 Nor does it mean, as I find myself accused of saying by some colleagues, th
... See moreN. T. Wright • Jesus Victory of God V2: Christian Origins And The Question Of God
To this strand within the kingdom-story belong those short parables that envisage people giving up everything to follow Jesus. Pearls of great price can only be bought when one has sold everything else; the buried treasure is worth all else that one might have to abandon.210 The various mammon-sayings function in the same way: following Jesus meant
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