Quotes About Scripture

I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.

practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named).

Despite two millennia of Christian apologetics, the fact is that belief in a dying and rising messiah simply did not exist in Judaism. In the entirety of the Hebrew Bible there is not a single passage of scripture or prophecy about the promised messiah that even hints of his ignominious death, let alone his bodily resurrection.

The Prophet himself sometimes openly suppressed or negated older verses, considering them to have been replaced by newer ones. That is because Muhammad did not consider the Quran to be a static Revelation, which may be why he never bothered to authorize its collection into a codified book. The Quran was for Muhammad a living scripture that consciously evolved alongside the Ummah, continually adapting itself to meet the specific needs of the developing community.

As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.

Remember, all I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty. But then we must have some independent criterion for deciding which are the moral bits: a criterion which, wherever it comes from, cannot come from scripture itself and is presumably available to all of us whether we are religious or not.

Those who wish to base their morality literally on the Bible have either not read it or not understood it, as Bishop John Shelby Spong, in The Sins of Scripture, rightly observed.

Indeed, adherents of scriptural authority show distressingly little curiosity about the (normally highly dubious) historical origins of their holy books.

The wolfish horror of the worst scriptural verses is cloaked under various forms of sheep's clothing: the words are not meant to be taken literally, they are 'metaphorical'.

we do not, and should not, derive our morals from scripture, Jesus has to be honoured as a model for that very thesis.

Quoting Scripture texts is different than shaping a worldview around them.

Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab ("the People of the Book"). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language.

Any interpretation of scripture that bred hatred or disdain for others was illegitimate

The Hebrew term mishnah meant 'learning by repetition': even though it took written form, the new scripture was still conceived as an oral work and students continued to learn it by heart.

As Solomon ben Jehiel (1510–74), known as Maharshal, explained, scripture was the Word of God, so that even if the heavens and the oceans were ink, they would not suffice to expound a single passage of scripture, record all the doubts arising from it, and the many new ideas that it inspired.

Sound had always been sacred to the Aryans—it was far more important to them than the meaning of these hymns—so when they intoned and memorised them, the priests felt possessed by a sacred presence. The idea that the sound of a sacred text could be more important than the truths it conveys immediately challenges our modern notion of "scripture," which, of course, implies a written text.

Augustine was not a linguist. He knew no Hebrew and could not have encountered Jewish midrash, but he had come to the same conclusion as Hillel and Akiba. Any interpretation of scripture that spread hatred and dissension was illegitimate; all exegesis must be guided by the principle of charity.

Remember—the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

The Bible is God's Word expressed and revealed to his creature, man.

The man who, despite the teaching of Scripture, tries to pray without a Savior, insults the deity.

A man may just as soon read the Scripture without eyes, as understand the spirit of it without grace.

The natural man "cannot see or discern that divine excellency in the Scripture, without an apprehension whereof no man can believe it aright to be the word of God."

No man can in any measure resemble the scripture saints.