The following resource is from desiring God.org.

Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

Appreciate your coming and I'd like to get right down to it.

So the question is, was Jesus an ego maniac? And my approach is going to be to listen with you to four people who have stumbled and found serious problems with the self-exaltation of Jesus and of

God in the Christian scriptures.

So I'm going to listen to those people with you,

put some slides up, and let them talk.

I take their objections very seriously.

I've been thinking about it for about 40 years, gathering thoughts about this.

And then I want to give an answer to the question and my answer is going to be no.

Jesus is not an ego maniac even though the evidence that will take about 15 minutes to look at

is pretty compelling to a lot of people that he is. And then we'll try to show why the

answer no is true with a kind of syllogism at the end.

So that's the plan to listen and then to answer

and then to give a reason.

So Eric Reese is the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky Lexington. In 2009, he published a book called An American Gospel and then in May of that year he did an interview on NPR.

This is how I know about it. I was listening at the time, but with Terry Gross, fresh air, if you know that program, and in it, Terry Gross cited his book, page 28, this text, and he quoted Jesus,

whoever loves father or mother more than me

is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter

more than me is not worthy of me and whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not

worthy of me whoever finds his life will lose it and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

So she quotes that and then she quotes the next line in the book which goes like this.

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