people-from-nazareth

"To sum up, it can be said that not only May Ziyadeh's poetry but also her stories, plays and articles reflect the wrong attitudes of people in her society by revealing the actual history of her time. Her fictional works allow the reader to conceptualize the "woman question" in Arabic history and culture, and the poet's sufferings as a well-educated, westernized person who is trying to change the cultural norms and establish an egalitarian society without gender discrimination. Like, Þüküfe Nihal, the Turkish poetess, May Zeyadeh, the renowned poetess of Lebanese origin, because of her progressive ideas in women's rights and education and freedom, has been misunderstood by her contemporaries and nearest circle."

"Women’s education was rare, if non-existent...When she joined this literary circle, she was highly cultured, not just from what she learned at school but also from the books she read. That’s why educating women was an obsession for her, as she herself was very cultured. That was a first sign of her rebellion against ignorance and her demands to educate girls at an early age."

""We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life." These spellbinding words are the saying of a renowned feminist, who was among the first Arab literary figures to embellish feminine intellectuality."

"I really like subtle ideas and communication with refined people who take you beyond daily chores and small sad events."

"I love France and England not with a political love, because I don't know anything about politics, but an esthetic one: I love their literatures, poetry, and some individuals."

"A true romantic, Zeyadah's literary style is characterized by fusing emotion with fantasy and romanticism with objectivity...More than anything else, she left behind a legacy of women liberators who believed that with knowledge and art, women can finally inhale the ions of emancipation."

"the gifted writer"

"In an opening speech of one of her lectures, May Ziyadeh described poverty as 'illness, indolence and enslavement' and she continued as follows: "No society can enjoy good health when its members are ill... and no nation can enjoy independence if its citizens are enslaved. An attribute of the rich is a virtue but for the poor it is a flaw. ... Women can be a cause for poverty but can also be a cause for prosperity"...In her speech at one of her conferences, May Ziyadeh emphasized the role of women in a civilized society to stand in opposition to the traditional culture in the following statement: "We should free the woman, so that her children won't grow up to become slaves. And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a great meaning to life"...May Ziyadeh criticizes male-dominated society and addresses men that "if you are the material, the women are the soul, if you are the fiction, the women are the prose""

"You ask how we are these days. What do you think is the condition of small nations? What could be the seal set upon them in present circumstances, but humiliation and more humiliation? I know very little about politics and I admit that I would be imposing if I were to tackle the history of nations and their fate. But the little I know from what I have studied tells me that sincerity between nations is scarce and that honesty in people's souls is a poetic illusion with which leaders seek to influence the minds and affections of others, in order to make them pay with their blood and their lives. Why? For economic gain. That is all! Particularly during a war, to someone with a critical eye, "freedom" seems a rhetorical wine to intoxicate the people's hearts. Freedom has beautiful and precious meaning, but everything sweet and dear is impossible. Had the people tasted real freedom even for a second, they would have been gods. Indeed divinity is absolute freedom."

"It cannot be hard for you to understand how the war has destroyed in our glowing souls beliefs we thought eternal and how it has injured whatever hopes we had, the greatest and most splendid hopes. Tell me: if we despair of progress, we who have dedicated to it all our thoughts and spiritual energy, what can we hope for? And where can we search for a base on which to build the palaces of hope?"

"The best characterization is provided by the product of this religious education, the Jew himself. His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine. Of course, the latter made no secret of his attitude toward the Jewish people, and when necessary he even took the whip to drive from the temple of the Lord this adversary of all humanity, who then as always saw in religion nothing but an instrument for his business existence. In return, Christ was nailed to the cross, while our present-day party Christians debase themselves to begging for Jewish votes at elections and later try to arrange political swindles with atheistic Jewish parties—and this against their own nation."

"Who and whatever James was, so was Jesus."

"Would you get out your checkbook tonight? … Bring what you would for JESUS tonight."

"I say: my feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to the fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as sufferer but as fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and of adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before — the fact that it was for this that He had to shed His blood upon the Cross."

"Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human being."

"Here is a man who was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in another obscure village, where He worked in a carpenter shop until He was thirty, and then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never owned a home. He never had a family. He never went to college. He never put his foot inside a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where He was born. He never did one of the things that usually accompany greatness. He had no credentials but Himself. He had nothing to do with this world except the naked power of His divine manhood. While still a young man, the tide of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. One of them denied Him. He was turned over to His enemies. He went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. His executioners gambled for the only piece of property He had on earth while He was dying — and that was his coat. When he was dead He was taken down and laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend. Nineteen wide centuries have come and gone and today He is the centerpiece of the human race and the leader of the column of progress. I am far within the mark when I say that all the armies that ever marched, and all the navies that ever were built, and all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned, put together have not affected the life of man upon this earth as powerfully as has that One Solitary Life."

"All good men are anarchists. All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are anarchists. Jesus was an anarchist."

"The historical Christ, then, is a glorious Being belonging to the great spiritual hierarchy that guides the spiritual evolution of humanity, who used for some three years the human body of the disciple Jesus; who spent the last of these three years in public teaching... who was a healer of diseases and performed other remarkable occult works; who gathered round Him a small band of disciples whom He instructed in the deeper truths of the spiritual life; who drew men to Him by the singular love and tenderness and the rich wisdom that breathed from His Person; and who was finally put to death for blasphemy, for teaching the inherent Divinity of Himself and of all men. p.141"

"Many years of work as an evangelist and as a teacher in the field of Christian principles, and a difficult cycle in which I faced the problem of my own relation to Christ and to Christianity, have brought me to two definitely clear and clean-cut recognitions: first, a recognition of the reality of the Individuality of Christ and of His Mission; and secondly, a recognition that the development of the Christ Consciousness and the Christ Nature in individual man, and in the race as a whole, carries with it the solution of our world problem... The kingdom of God is now in process of rapid formation, as all those with forward-seeing vision and a realisation of the rapidly emerging beauty and divinity of man can bear testimony. We are passing through the transition period between the old age and the new, and the true mission of Christ, so deeply and frequently obscured by theological implications and disputations, embodies in itself the coming revelation. The development of humanity guarantees the recognition of Christ and His work and its participation, consciously, in the kingdom of God. (Forward)"

""My son, the Holy Church is on the right, but Jesus Christ was always on the left.”"

"In Jesus, God wills to be true God not only in the height but also in the depth — in the depth of human creatureliness, sinfulness and mortality."

"To that manifested Presence the name of "the Christ" may rightly be given, and it was He who lived and moved in the form of the man Jesus over the hills and plains of Palestine, teaching, healing diseases, and gathering round Him as disciples a few of the more advanced souls. The rare charm of His royal love, outpouring from Him as rays from a sun, drew round Him the suffering, the weary, and the oppressed, and the subtly tender magic of His gentle wisdom purified, ennobled, and sweetened the lives that came into contact with His own... By parable and luminous imagery He taught the uninstructed crowds who pressed around Him, and, using the powers of the free Spirit, He healed many a disease by word or touch, reinforcing the magnetic energies belonging to His pure body with the compelling force of His inner life... The teachers and rulers of His nation soon came to eye Him with jealousy and anger; His spirituality was a constant reproach to their materialism, His power a constant, though silent, exposure of their weakness. p. 136"

"If the church ... does not make God's liberation of the oppressed central in its mission and proclamation, how can it rest easy with a condemned criminal as the dominant symbol of its message?"

"We, as Christians, are asked to take a very great deal on trust; the teachings, for example, and the miracles of Jesus. If we had to take all on trust, I, for one, should be sceptical. The crux of the problem of whether Jesus was, or was not, what he proclaimed himself to be, must surely depend upon the truth or otherwise of the resurrection. On that greatest point we are not merely asked to have faith. In its favour as a living truth there exists such overwhelming evidence, positive and negative, factual and circumstantial, that no intelligent jury in the world could fail to bring in a verdict that the resurrection story is true."

"He has been disfigured and distorted by cunning priests to serve their knavish ends and by ignorant idolaters to give godly sanction to their blind bigotry and savage superstition. He has persisted in spite of two thousand years of theological emasculation to destroy his revolutionary personality."

"As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene. ... No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life."

"Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind."

"I'm hoping that [the defrauded faithful will] see that it's not necessary to look to some person to jerk you off to get off and put your belief in."

"[To an elderly women requesting a blessing.] Do you believe that the Lord's going to do it tonight? Do you believe that he's going to touch this condition? Say Yes Lord. Say THANK YOU JESUS! In the name of Jesus! In the name of JESUS! [Woman collapses in euphoria.] Thank you Jesus. Hallelujah!"

"Christian anarchism is based upon the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees, when He said that he without sin should be the first to cast the stone, and upon the Sermon on the Mount, which advises the return of good for evil and the turning of the other cheek. Therefore, when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial, and executive officials, we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon on the Mount. The dictionary definition of a Christian is one who follows Christ; kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary cooperation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian anarchist is therefore one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneychangers, and does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian anarchist does not depend upon bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One-Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused, and dying world."

"A myth is capable of becoming a fact in the experience of an individual, for a myth is a fact which can be proven. Upon the myths we take our stand, but we must seek to re-interpret them in the light of the present. Through self-initiated experiment we can prove their validity; through experience we can establish them as governing forces in our lives; and through their expression we can demonstrate their truth to others. This is the theme of this book, dealing as it does with the facts of the Gospel story, that fivefold sequential myth which teaches us the revelation of divinity in the Person of Jesus Christ, and which remains eternally truth, in the cosmic sense, in the historical sense, and in its practical application to the individual. This myth divides itself into five great episodes: 1. The Birth at Bethlehem. 2. The Baptism in Jordan. 3. The Transfiguration on Mount Carmel. 4. The Crucifixion on Mount Golgotha. 5. The Resurrection and Ascension. (Chapter One)"

"But it must not be supposed that the work of the Christ for His followers was over after He had established the Mysteries, or was confined to rare appearances therein. That Mighty One who had used the body of Jesus as His vehicle, and whose guardian care extends over the whole spiritual evolution of the fifth race of humanity, gave into the strong hands of the holy disciple who had surrendered to Him his body the care of the infant Church. Perfecting his human evolution, Jesus became one of the Masters of Wisdom, and took Christianity under His special charge, ever seeking to guide it to the right lines, to protect, to guard and nourish it. He was the Hierophant in the Christian Mysteries, the direct Teacher of the Initiates. His the inspiration that kept alight the Gnosis in the Church, until the superincumbent mass of ignorance became so great that even His breath could not fan the flame sufficiently to prevent its extinguishment. p. 142"

"Yea, come unto Christ, and be perfected in him, and deny yourselves of all ungodliness; and if ye shall deny yourselves of all ungodliness, and love God with all your might, mind and strength, then is his grace sufficient for you, that by his grace ye may be perfect in Christ; and if by the grace of God ye are perfect in Christ, ye can in nowise deny the power of God. And again, if ye by the grace of God are perfect in Christ, and deny not his power, then are ye sanctified in Christ by the grace of God, through the shedding of the blood of Christ, which is in the covenant of the Father unto the remission of your sins, that ye become holy, without spot."

"And if there were miracles wrought then, why has God ceased to be a God of miracles and yet be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles. And the reason why he ceaseth to do miracles among the children of men is because that they dwindle in unbelief, and depart from the right way, and know not the God in whom they should trust. Jesus doesn't do miracles any more because everyone has dwindled in unbelief. Behold, I say unto you that whoso believeth in Christ, doubting nothing, whatsoever he shall ask the Father in the name of Christ it shall be granted him; and this promise is unto all, even unto the ends of the earth."

"And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall."

"And now, my beloved brethren, and also Jew, and all ye ends of the earth, hearken unto these words and believe in Christ; and if ye believe not in these words believe in Christ. And if ye shall believe in Christ ye will believe in these words, for they are the words of Christ, and he hath given them unto me; and they teach all men that they should do good. And if they are not the words of Christ, judge ye—for Christ will show unto you, with power and great glory, that they are his words, at the last day; and you and I shall stand face to face before his bar; and ye shall know that I have been commanded of him to write these things, notwithstanding my weakness."

"And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins."

"Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life."

"The fundamental principles of our religion are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it."

"If Jesus came back and saw what's going on in his name, he'd never stop throwing up."

"Paul, in the fifteenth chapter of his Epistle to the Corinthians, gives a detailed list of several resurrection appearances. Now there is scarcely a scholar who has doubted the genuineness of 1 Corinthians, and its date is generally accepted as about 56 A.D. But the apostle writes that he had not only previously given his readers this information orally (i.e., in 49 A.D.), but had himself 'received' it, presumably from those who were apostles before him. This may take us back to 40 A.D. or to within some ten years of the crucifixion.... Paul tells us that in 56 A.D. the majority of some 500 original witnesses were still alive...."

"Jesus Christ is to me the outstanding personality of all time, all history, both as Son of God and as Son of Man. Everything he ever said or did has value for us today and that is something you can say of no other man, dead or alive. There is no easy middle ground to stroll upon. You either accept Jesus or reject him."

"He is the World Teacher and not a Christian teacher. He Himself told us that He had other folds, and to them He has meant as much as He has meant to the orthodox Christian. They may not call Him Christ, but they have their own name for Him and follow Him as truly and faithfully as their Western brethren."

"In the future, the eyes of humanity will be fixed upon the Christ, and not upon any such man-made institutions as the Church and its dignitaries; Christ will be seen as He is in reality, working through His disciples, through the Masters of the Wisdom, and through His followers who toil unseen (and usually unrecognised) behind world affairs. The sphere of His activity will be known to be the human heart and also the crowded market places of the world, but not some stone edifice, and not the pomp and ceremony of any ecclesiastical headquarters."

"And so, looking over the world at the moment, there seems little likelihood that when He comes He will be welcome. A few will recognise Him as they ever have done, and maybe, as the characteristics of the coming race are those of spirituality, there will be more to welcome Him, for the spiritual life is spreading to-day, and those who are of the Spirit will know the law of the Spirit; and I would fain leave you with the thought tonight that that is a truth, that the Supreme Teacher will again ere very long be incarnate upon earth, again made manifest as Teacher, again walking and living amongst us as last He walked in Palestine. Splendid as is the hope, mighty as is the inspiration, there is nothing too glorious to be possible for the ever-unfolding Spirit in man, and the hope of to-day is that that spirit is spreading, despite the characteristics of our time; that men are becoming more liberal, more tolerant, more ready to recognise that which is true and just."

"It may well be that we have reached such a time... that the popular mind of the day will be transcended by large numbers of the more spiritually minded, and that when He comes again He will be able to stay amongst us more than the three brief years that marked His last ministry. That, then, is the word, the thought I leave with you: to develop in yourselves the Spirit of the Christ, and then at His coming you shall recognise His beauty. Learn compassion, learn tenderness, learn good thoughts of others rather than evil, learn to be tender with the weak, learn to be reverent to the great; and if you can develop those qualities in you, then the coming Christ may be able to number you among His disciples, and the welcome that the earth shall give Him shall not again be a cross."

"From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother. That Christianity has regarded and does regard him as God and Savior has always appeared to me a fact of the highest importance which, for his sake and my own, I must endeavor to understand … I am more than ever certain that a great place belongs to him in Israel's history of faith and that this place cannot be described by any of the usual categories."

"According to the New Testament, Jesus is the man for others who views his existence as inextricably tied to other men to the degree that his own Person is inexplicable apart from others. The others, of course, refer to all men, especially the oppressed, the unwanted of society, the "sinners." He is God himself coming into the very depths of human existence for the sole purpose of striking off the chains of slavery, thereby freeing man from ungodly principalities and powers that hinder his relationship with God."

"By becoming poor and entrusting divine revelation to a carpenter from Nazareth, God makes clear where one has to be in order to hear the divine word and experience divine presence."

"Hearken, O ye elders of my church, saith the Lord your God, who have assembled yourselves together, according to my commandments, in this land, which is the land of Missouri, which is the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the saints. Wherefore, this is the land of promise, and the place for the city of Zion. And thus saith the Lord your God, if you will receive wisdom here is wisdom. Behold, the place which is now called Independence is the center place; and a spot for the temple is lying westward, upon a lot which is not far from the courthouse."