"I am an historian, I am not a believer, but I must confess as a historian that this penniless preacher from Nazareth is irrevocably the very center of history. Jesus Christ is easily the most dominant figure in all history." H.G. Wells, British author (1866-1946)
"I cannot say that Jesus was uniquely divine. He was as much God as Krishna, or Rama, or Mohammed, or Zoroaster." Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political leader (1869-1948) "A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act." Mahatma Gandhi, Indian political leader (1869-1948)
"There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that he believed in hell... It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take him as his chroniclers represent him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that." Bertrand Russell, British philosopher (1872-1970)
"Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God must be a rebel as well as a king." G.K. Chesterton, English critic and author (1874-1936)
"From my youth onwards I have found in Jesus my great brother." Martin Buber, Jewish philosopher (1878-1965)
"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." Albert Einstein, physicist and atheist (1879-1955)
"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." Sholem Asch, Jewish author (1880-1957)
"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." Karl Barth, Swiss theologian (1886-1968)
"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 a 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 open to us. He did not intend to. C.S. Lewis, British author (1898-1963)
"In his own lifetime Jesus made no impact on history. This is something that I cannot but regard as a special dispensation on God's part, and, I like to think, yet another example of the ironical humour which informs so many of his purposes. To me, it seems highly appropriate that the most important figure in all history should thus escape the notice of memoirists, diarists, commentators, all the tribe of chroniclers who even then existed." Malcolm Muggeridge, British journalist (1903-90)
"Every person is Christ for me, and since there is only one Jesus, that person is the one person in the world at that moment." Mother Teresa (1910-97)
"He might be described as an underprivileged, working-class victim of political and religious persecution." Prince Phillip (born 1921)
"I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event. If the resurrection of Jesus from the dead on that Easter Sunday were a public event which had been made known...not only to the 530 Jewish witnesses but to the entire population, all Jews would have become followers of Jesus." Pinchas Lapide, Orthodox Jewish scholar, Germany (born 1922)
"An unsurpassed master of the art of laying bare the inmost core of spiritual truth." Geza Vermes, author (born 1924)
"If Jesus had been killed 20 years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses." Lenny Bruce, American satirist (1925-66)
"It is as wholly wrong to blame Marx for what was done in his name, as it is to blame Jesus for what was done in his." Tony Benn, British politician (born 1925)
"After the fall of so many gods in this century, this person, broken at the hands of his opponents and constantly betrayed through the ages by his adherents, is obviously still for innumerable people the most moving figure in the long history of mankind." Hans Küng, German theologian (born 1928)
"Jesus Christ was an extremist for love, truth and goodness." Martin Luther King Jr., American civil rights leader (1929-68)
"Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind." Mikhail Gorbachev (born 1931)
"If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he wouldn't be able to stop throwing up." Woody Allen, American comedian (born 1935)
"We're more popular than Jesus now." John Lennon, Beatle (1940-80)
"2,000 years ago one man got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if everyone was nice to each other for a change." Douglas Adams, British comic author and radical atheist (1952-2001