Quotes for Colossians 1:15-23

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that option open to us. He did not intend to."[1]

"He is not one avatar among many. He is God present, and definitely so. He did not manifest a Christ Principle, a modern abstraction of New Age values, he fully incarnated God. He is not primarily a moral example (though he is certainly that as well), but the connecting link by which humanity, warped and unable to fulfill the Divine intention, is brought back into touch with God."[2]

"(In the New Testament, Jesus is depicted as) "'the one in whom is manifested' the Creator of the universe; the fullest disclosure of the character and person of God; the focal point of all that God has been doing in history; the chief personality in God's creation of the world; the ruler of natural forces; the watershed of human destiny, and the only path to the presence of God. Jesus is portrayed not simply as the greatest teacher, but as the foundation of all teaching—that is, truth itself."[3]

"The Jesus of history and faith has been coopted by nearly everyone wanting a towering figure from the past to confirm their own ideals of the present and vision of the future."[4]

"To Eastern-oriented religious groups, Jesus is an avatar—one of many incarnations of God; to Christian Scientists, he is the Great Healer' to political revolutionaries, he is the Great Liberator; to Spiritualists, he is a first-rate medium; to one new consciousness philosopher, he is the prototype of Carlos Castanedes' Don Juan, a sorcerer who can restructure events in the world by a mental exercise. Everyone, it seems, wants Jesus for themselves."[5]

"Now, according to the normal way of thinking about the Christian religion, we cannot identify with Jesus . . . To say 'I and the Father are one,' as Jesus did, is blasphemy for us. However, in the Thomas gospel that was dug up in Egypt some forty years ago, Jesus says, 'He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he.' Now, that is exactly Buddhism. We are all manifestations of Buddha consciousness, or Christ consciousness, only we don’t know it. The word 'Buddha' means 'the one ho waked up.' We are all to do that—to wake up to the Christ or Buddha consciousness within us. This is blasphemy in the normal way of Christian thinking, but it is the very essence of Christian Gnosticism and of the Thomas gospel."[6]

" . . . The basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true of you and me as well. Jesus was a historical person who realized in himself that he and what he called his Father were one, and he lived out of that knowledge of the Christhood of his nature."[7]

"When Jesus says, 'He who drinks from my mouth will become as I am, and I shall be he,' he is talking from the point of view of that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us. Anyone who lives in relation to that is as Christ. Anyone who brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus . . . "[8]

" . . . the historical Jesus almost certainly did not in fact teach that he was in any sense God . . . The proper conclusion to draw . . . is that the idea of divine incarnation is a metaphorical (mythological) idea."[9]

JESUS SEMINAR: Jesus was a wandering sage who spoke in parables and emphasized the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.

ISLAM: Jesus was a prophet like Moses and others (Sura 3:78,79). He was the Messiah (Sura 4:169; cf. 5:79). But he was not God (Sura 5:19), and was not crucified in a substitutionary death (Sura 4:155,156).

HINDUISM: Many Hindus consider Jesus to be an avatar, a revelation of Vishnu.

Avatars have many human manifestations (BG 4:5; cf. Jn. 1:14,18).

Vishnu's purpose in the original avatar (Krishna) was destruction of evil-doers (BG 4:8; cf. Jn. 3:16).

Avatars show a (not the) path to enlightenment (BG 4:11; cf. Jn. 14:6).

Salvation comes after many lives (BG 6:43,45; cf. Heb. 9:27).

BUDDHISM: Many Buddhists consider Jesus to be a bodhisattva, an enlightened one who is able to assist others to their own enlightenment.

There are many bodhisattvas showing paths to enlightenment (Shikshasamuccaya, 280-282; cf. Acts 4:12).

Bodhisattvas have to overcome karmic debt and find enlightenment--utter detachment from all things (Dhammapada, 211;Samyutta Nikaya, II, 21; cf. 2 Cor. 5:21).

Emptiness of non-being is the outcome of bodisattva's enlightenment (Dhammapada, 90-94; Santideva, Bodhiscaryavatara; cf. Jn. 14:2-3).

Other Ideas

Use Heb. 1 to help interpret 1:15-17. It is a true parallel passage, stressing the same points and written to correct the same error that Jesus was not higher than the angels.

Today, we must do more than just lay out the claims of Jesus and call on people to decide whether they will reject or accept them. There pervasive doubt on a very basic level about what we can know about Jesus.

There is no way we can get back to the real Jesus to know who he claimed to be. Therefore, no one's view of Jesus is any more accurate or truer than any one else's.

All we have is the record of the faith of different communities, some of whom marginalized others (Hick; Pagels).

"The gospels are now assumed to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by the mythic elements that express the church's faith in him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers first-hand."[10]

However, Jewish scholars Geza Vermes and David Flusser differ, saying "We know more about Jesus than about almost any other first-century Jew (namely, the apostle Paul)."[11] Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner criticizes the Jesus Seminar as "either the greatest scholarly hoax since the Piltdown Man or the utter bankruptcy of New Testament studies—I hope the former."[12]

Therefore, the integrity of the New Testament documents becomes a crucial issue. Can we show that they were written by eyewitnesses, that they have historical integrity, etc.? Can we also show that the other documents that present a different picture of Jesus are likely to be inaccurate? See Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, Jesus Under Fire (Grand Rapids: Zondervan House, 1995) for an excellent scholarly answer to this question.

Footnotes

[1] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 56.

[2] J. Gordon Melton, "Toward a Christian Response to the New Age Movement," 1985, pp. 2,3.

[3] John Snyder, Reincarnation vs. Resurrection (Chicago: Moody Press, 1984), p. 67.

[4] Russell Chandler, Understanding the New Age (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1988), p. 317.

[5] James W. Sire, Scripture Twisting (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1980), p. 24.

[6] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 57.

[7] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 210.

[8] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 213.

[9] John Hick, God Has Many Faces, p. 28.

[10] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (New York: Macmillan, 1993), p. 5.

[11] Cited in Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland, Jesus Under Fire (Grand Rapids: Zondervan House, 1995), p. 4.

[12] Interview by Robert N. Ostling, "Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple," Time, 10 January 1994, p. 39.