A Jesus for Everyone
What if you could take Jesus seriously without signing on to everything built in his name?
Many people walk away from Christianity because of clergy scandals, hypocrisy, or a list of doctrines they can’t accept. But walking away from the institution doesn’t have to mean walking away from the teacher. A Jesus for Everyone is a short, readable look at what the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually say, and what a first-century Jewish teacher named Yeshua might still have to say to us.
It isn’t about trying to convert, reconvert, or deconvert you. This short book offers ten chapters that touch on some of the major points that help to put the New Testament in context by focusing on the lessons in the earliest gospels.
What you’ll find inside:
- The word usually translated as “sin” comes from an archery term meaning to miss the mark.
- “Original sin” comes from Augustine, four hundred years after the fact, not from anything in the Gospels.
- The heaven and hell of popular imagination are largely products of theology written centuries later.
- How the Gospels were remembered, copied, translated, and argued over for centuries, from Jerome to Tyndale to the King James Bible.
- What the Beatitudes and “love your enemies” meant in a land occupied by Rome, and why Yeshua pushes past the Golden Rule.
- Why his harshest words were aimed at religious hypocrisy, not at sinners.
- The troubling sayings that deserve to be faced, not explained away.
Beyond the Dogma
My Search for Meaning in the Gospels of
Matthew, Mark, and Luke
A priest’s words stopped author David LoBurgio in his tracks: “If you don’t believe that Jesus died and was physically raised from the dead in three days, you can’t call yourself a Catholic.” For many people, that kind of boundary ends the conversation. For him, it started one.
Beyond the Dogma is the record of one lapsed Catholic’s honest journey through the Synoptic Gospels — Matthew, Mark, and Luke — in search of wisdom accessible to believers and skeptics alike. Along the way, LoBurgio strips away centuries of theological development to find something unexpected: a first-century Jewish teacher whose core message about compassion, justice, forgiveness, and meaning speaks as clearly today as it did two thousand years ago.
He brings his own experience to every page — decades of spiritual searching across traditions, the doubts, the questions, and the moments of unexpected recognition that come from reading these ancient texts with genuinely fresh eyes.