I can only give away the love that I have received.

Another [book on Matthew] is Amy-Jill Levine, who is a Jewish woman who teaches New Testament at the Vanderbilt School of Religion. It's a group of essays by mostly womanly scholars looking at Matthew's gospel through feminists' eyes - very exciting. It opens up all sorts of things that I've never thought about.

The God of the Hebrews is a God that human language, we're not even supposed to speak the holy name. We were told in the Second Commandment we could make no images of this God, and I don't think that means just building idols, I think that means also trying to believe you've captured God in your words, in the Creeds, in the Scriptures.

The primary message of the Christian Church is that we were born in sin and we need to be rescued; we cannot rescue ourselves, so God comes to our rescue, pays the price of our sin and transforms us through the death of Jesus.

Was Judas Iscariot a figure of history? I do not think so. There is no mention of him in any source before the 8th decade.

In fact, in 1724 the Western world learned that women were co-creators of life that's when it was discovered that women had an egg cell.

As for the status of Western Christianity, we are in a place where our task is to redefine the primary symbols of our faith or tradition in a more human direction. That's the thing I spend my time doing.