Christians Quotes
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In some parts of the church, the Apocalypse of John (the book of Revelation) was flat out rejected as containing false teaching, whereas the Apocalypse of Peter, which eventually did not make it in, was accepted. There were some Christians who accepted the Gospel of Peter and some who rejected the Gospel of John. There were some Christians who accepted a truncated version of the Gospel of Luke (without its first two chapters), and others who accepted the now noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Some Christians rejected the three Pastoral Epistles of 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, which eventually made it in, and others accepted the Epistle of Barnabas, which did not.
Bart Ehrman
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I would argue that Jesus has always been recontextualized by people living in different times and places. The first followers of Jesus did this after they came to believe that he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven: they made him into something he had not been before and understood him in light of their new situation. So too did the later authors of the New Testament, who recontextualized and understood Jesus in light of their own, now even more different situations. So too did the Christians of the second and third centuries, who understood Jesus less as an apocalyptic prophet and more as a divine being become human. So too did the Christians of the fourth century, who maintained that he had always existed and had always been equal with God the Father in status, authority, and power. And so too do Christians today, who think that the divine Christ they believe in and confess is identical in every respect with the person who was walking the dusty lanes of Galilee preaching his apocalyptic message of the coming destruction. Most Christians today do not realize that they have recontextualized Jesus. But in fact they have. Everyone who either believes in him or subscribes to any of his teachings has done so—from the earliest believers who first came to believe in his resurrection until today. And so it will be, world without end.
Bart Ehrman
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God is playing a role in all religions and that Christians are more united than they sometimes think.
George O. Wood
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The priest is not made. He must be born a priest; must inherit his office. I refer to the new birth-the birth of water and the Spirit. Thus all Christians must became priests, children of God and co-heirs with Christ the Most High Priest.
Martin Luther
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Atrocities are now shown in 30-second bites. Hardcore artistic horror is an expression of hating your neighbour. The gruesome imagination feeds on vanity, lust, self-indulgence and despair, rather than the hope of the Holy Spirit. The Body of Christ needs to look and repent of our own fallenness.... Whatever arena Christians withdraw from goes to hell.
Calvin Seerveld
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Some scholars have argued that ancient religion was principally concerned with averting the gods’ anger.
But this divine anger was aroused almost always because of neglect.
he gods—or at least one ofthem—had not been respected and worshiped properly or sufficiently.
That was the main logic behind Roman persecution of the Christians.
Because this group of miscreants refused to worship the gods, there was hell to pay.
Bart Ehrman
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I think that as Christians we need to walk the delicate balance between standing in opposition to same-sex marriages and yet showing that we can do that without becoming angry or hateful.
Erwin W. Lutzer
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At the end of the day, the biggest obstacle to evangelism is Christians who don’t share the gospel.
Albert Mohler
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As Christians in America, we’re often lulled into the false belief that somehow we have a monopoly on the pure and undiluted version of the message of Jesus. Unfortunately, we don’t. Christianity by nature has a tendency to blend in and become obscured by the cultural influences that surround it—such has been the case for nearly 2,000 years of Christian history.
Benjamin L. Corey
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How could they say that my religion, Islam was a 'race hate' religion after all the plunder and enslavement and domination of my people by white Christians in the name of white supremacy?
Muhammad Ali
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The earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a “skeptical” view or a “secular” view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.)
Bart Ehrman
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To be Christians under the law of grace does not mean to wander unbridled outside the law, but to be engrafted in Christ, by whose grace we are free from the curse of the law, and by whose Spirit we have the law engraved upon our hearts.
John Calvin
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On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community...
On the imperial level this meant that it was widely known—and genuinely believed by most—that it was the gods who had made the empire great...
The Christians refused to worship or even acknowledge the gods of the empire, claiming in fact that these were evil, demonic beings, not beneficent deities that promoted the just cause of the greatest empire the world had ever known.
The refusal to worship was seen by others to be dangerous to the well-being of the empire and thus to the security of the state.
And so the decision to persecute—which seems to us, perhaps, to be a strictly religious affair—was at the time inherently sociopolitical as well.
Bart Ehrman
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The Christians and Jews can live side by side with the Muslims, as they did in the heart of Europe for over 800 years in Andalusia.
Anjem Choudary
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What shall we Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? ... I will give my faithful advice: First, that one should set fire to their synagogues. . . . Then that one should also break down and destroy their houses. . . . That one should drive them out the country.
Martin Luther
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The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door, and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
Brennan Manning
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But too many Christians are content in their own salvation and allow an ethnocentric provincialism to dismiss the imperative of God’s mission to the nations.
Ed Stetzer
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One of our driving questions throughout this study will always be what these Christians meant by saying “Jesus is God.” As we will see, different Christians meant different things by it.
Bart Ehrman
