“The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel.”
John Shelby Spong (1931) American bishop
Source: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), p. 78
As reported in Einstein — A Life (1996) by Denis Brian, when asked about a clipping from a magazine article reporting his comments on Christianity as taken down by Viereck, Einstein carefully read the clipping and replied, "That is what I believe." .
1920s, Viereck interview (1929)
“The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel.”
John Shelby Spong (1931) American bishop
Source: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism (1991), p. 78
“No one who reads the gospels thoughtfully and sympathetically will maintain that Jesus”
Robert Hunter (author) (1874–1942) American sociologist, author, golf course architect
Source: Why We Fail as Christians (1919), p. 6-7
Context: No one who reads the gospels thoughtfully and sympathetically will maintain that Jesus—whether God or man—was incapable of making himself completely understood. We must therefore seek for a better explanation of the confusion that exists among the avowed believers in the divinity of Christ, as well as among those who deny the divinity of Christ.
Jacques Ellul book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes
Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes (1962)
Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist
You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)
Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States
Tragedy and the Common Man (1949)
Context: I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing — his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.
Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer
Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.VII The Way They Went: Greco-Roman Meets Judeo-Christian
Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian
[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus, https://books.google.com/books?id=VJh1H-hf5EwC&pg=PA85, 2000, Prometheus Books, Publishers, 978-1-61592-120-1, 85]
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
Source: Stride Toward Freedom (1958); also quoted in The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1982), by Stephen B. Oates, pp. 81-82 note: 1950s
Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher
On the Sermon on the Mount, as translated by William Findlay (1888), Book I, Ch. 1 http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/16011.htm <br class="br">Context: If any one will piously and soberly consider the sermon which our Lord Jesus spoke on the mount, as we read it in the Gospel according to Matthew, I think that he will find in it, so far as regards the highest morals, a perfect standard of the Christian life: and this we do not rashly venture to promise, but gather it from the very words of the Lord Himself. For the sermon itself is brought to a close in such a way, that it is clear there are in it all the precepts which go to mould the life. … He has sufficiently indicated, as I think, that these sayings which He uttered on the mount so perfectly guide the life of those who may be willing to live according to them, that they may justly be compared to one building upon a rock.
Louis Portella Mbuyu (1942) Congolese catholic bishop
homily at the celebration of the Mass to mark the Golden Jubilee anniversary of Dei Verbum https://cnsng.org/makepdf.php?tab=1365 (November 23, 2015)