The real evidence for Jesus and Christianity is in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practicing Christians.
Lionel Blue
To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies.
Old friends die on you, and they're irreplaceable. You become dependent.
Early on I saw the repression and idolatry of Stalinism, and when it cracked, I was open to religion again.
On the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.
What would I have done if I'd been put to the test? Would I have risked my own life for people I hardly knew? Probably, I would have looked the other way at best or become another apologist for evil at worst.
I didn't want to be on the losing side. I was fed up with Jewish weakness, timidity and fear. I didn't want any more Jewish sentimentality and Jewish suffering. I was sickened by our sad songs.
Because of my Marxism, I was not into myths or miracles, whether it was the virgin birth, the physical resurrection or casting out demons from an epileptic.
This Christian poison hasn't stopped yet.
My mother enjoyed old age, and because of her I've begun to enjoy parts of it too. So far I've had it good and am crumbling nicely.
It's more fun to watch without joining in.
For a Christian, Jesus is the unique and only way that God has fully revealed himself. For a Jew this cannot be.
I still go to a Christian priory for retreats.
I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
For a devotee or lover, the being, worshipped or loved, will always be the only one for her or him.
Pious XII was too neutral to mention the gas chambers; decent people like my own family were turned into devils by crude Christianity.
I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, though it hasn't been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly.
At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
I have begun to sympathetically understand Paul, though I don't like him much.
I began to see that my problems, seen spiritually, were really my soul's plusses.
I was not comfortable worshipping another Jew.
I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford.
It is not possible to unknow what you do know - the result of that is fanaticism.
Praying privately in churches, I began to discover that heaven was my true home and also that it was here and now, woven into this life.
The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.
For some years I deserted religion in favour of Marxism. The republic of goodness seemed more attainable than the Kingdom of God.
To change, to convert? Why bother?
An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, We Jews are just ordinary human beings. Only a bit more so!
Someone gave me a New Testament. I had never before read it systematically. Some parts made sense, some parts shocked me.
Christianity had two faces which bewildered me - two pictures which didn't fit.
I thought of such Christian inventions as the ghetto and the Jewish badge of shame. The Nazis didn't have to go very far to pick up their know-how.
I was certainly open for something being on the edge of a nervous breakdown, perplexed by my own sexuality. I was gay.
I learnt pity, sympathy, and what it was like to be at the other end of the stick. Such lessons can't be learnt in lecture halls.
I found that when I did something for the sake of heaven, heaven happened. These things changed my life. I owe them to my encounter with Christianity.
It was admitted by the early rabbis that the sectarians could be as full of good works as eggs were full of meat.
In speaking of Jesus, I must speak about Christianity because I do not think it possible or profitable to divide the two.
The real evidence is not practically speaking in scholarship but in how Jesus and the Christianity based on him manifest themselves in the lives of practising Christians. Their lives are the proofs of their beliefs.
During the Second World War, evacuated to non-Jewish households, I encountered Christianity at home and in school.
The Christian use of religion as a personal love affair both shocked me, and attracted me.
Some of the parables of the Kingdom made wonderful sense, but the exclusivity in the New Testament put me off.
So many plusses, so many minuses.
I recovered my infant Judaism, but in a reformist version.
I have ended as a Reform Rabbi, grateful to Christianity for so many good things.
I feel that the Christian experience and the Jewish one have much to give each other. If this open society continues and there is no return to political anti-Semitism, then this encounter, deeper than any theology, may happen.
My mother was a modern woman with a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket to dance the Charleston.
Good things come, and I'm not just referring to riding the buses.
Discrimination against Jews can be read in Thomas Aquinas, and insults against Jews in Martin Luther.
