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Quote by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

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Friedrich Dürrenmatt

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“If Jesus had been an actual historical figure we have a thorny paradox. Either this Jesus was a remarkable individual who said and did a host of amazing, revolutionary things – but no one outside his fringe cult noticed for over a century. Or he didn’t – and yet shortly after his death, tiny communities of worshipers that cannot agree about the most basic facts of his life spring up, scattered all across the empire. The truth is inescapable: there simply could never have been a historical Jesus.”

“If Jesus was put to death by powerful elites protecting their turf, then the murder is only a historical or academic puzzle. But if those who knew Him best—His longtime admirers—were involved, everything changes. It suddenly becomes personal, for we are then forced to confront the more troubling questions: Would I have sided with the majority and cried out for His blood? Would you?”

“One of the impediments to an acceptance of the myth theory is the apparent incredibility of the proposition that faith in Paul's Jesus the Son (and by extension, the Gospel Jesus) could have arisen with no historical basis. But we have to realize how much the educated ancient Jew lived within his holy books, as did many of those gentiles who attached themselves to Judaism. The Jewish scriptures offered a universe in themselves, in which the avid scholar and prophet could move and breathe. He governed his life by the writings. Like the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, he could construct whole philosophies from elements of scripture, aided at times by mystical experiences. [...] God's plan had to reside in scripture, for that was how he communicated with the world. All it needed was the right key, the right inspiration through the Spirit to unlock that coded information. [...] Paul's conviction that the Spirit was guiding him as he sought meaning from the sacred texts guaranteed that he would get the message he was looking for.”