Quotes from NT Wright

9'So this is how you should pray: Our father in heaven, May your name be honoured 10May your kingdom come May your will be done As in heaven, so on earth. 11Give us today the bread we need now; 12And forgive us the things we owe, As we too have forgiven what was owed to us. 13Don't bring us into the great Trial, But rescue us from evil.

One way and another, all three synoptic gospels are clear: in telling the story of Jesus they are consciously telling the story of how Israel's God came back to his people, in judgment and mercy.

Belief in the bodily resurrection includes the belief that what is done in the present in the body, by the power of the Spirit, will be reaffirmed in the eventual future, in ways at which we can presently only guess. RESURRECTION:

We should allow ourselves, on a regular basis, to be struck anew by the thick, rich, multilayered nature of these four documents, so full of vivid human scenes, but so evocative in their resonance of meaning about the world, God, life and death, and pretty much everything else.

The kingdoms of the world run on violence. The kingdom of God, Jesus declared, runs on love. That is the good news.

But in first-century Christianity, what mattered was not people going from earth into God's kingdom in heaven. What mattered, and what Jesus taught his followers to pray, was that God's kingdom would come on earth as in heaven.

How would you describe a mature person?

The closest echoes to this double command are found in 1 Maccabees 2.68. Mattathias is telling his sons, especially Judas, to get ready for revolution. 'Pay back to the gentiles what is due to them,' he says, 'and keep the law's commands.

suggestion that "sin" does not make God angry (a frequent idea in modern thought as a reaction against the caricatures of an ill-tempered deity) needs to be treated with disdain.

the famous opening of the central poem in the book of Isaiah stresses comfort: "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.

The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings

Saul came from a family who knew what that meant. It meant Ioudaïsmos: as we saw, not a "religion" called "Judaism" in the modern Western sense, a system of piety and morality, but the active propagation of the ancestral way of life, defending it against external attacks and internal corruption and urging the traditions of the Torah upon other Jews, especially when they seemed to be compromising.