Quotes About History

The death of Jesus was the moment when the great gate of human history, bolted with iron bars and overgrown with toxic weeds, burst open so that the Creator's project of reconciliation between heaven and earth could at last be set in powerful motion. The myrtle will at last replace the brier, and the cypress the thorn.

More satisfactory by far, at the level of history, is to say with Gerhard Lohfink that Jesus did not intend to found a church because there already was one, namely the people of Israel itself. Jesus' intention was therefore to reform Israel, not to found a different community altogether.

Paul, like most Jews of his day and many subsequently, believed that in God's good purposes world history was divided into the "present age" (the time when the powers were still ruling) and the "age to come," when God would assume his rightful power at last. The dark powers invoked in paganism had held the world captive in the "present evil age," but now something new had happened:

Jesus is sheer, absolute gift of God. He is not a mere product of human history; he is the humanity of the God who graciously identifies with us and shares our human condition. No less human for that, for God's solidarity with us requires his full humanity. But human as God's self-gift to humanity, as 'Immanuel

Rabbinic literature, though it includes plenty of material from before AD 135, tends to see everything in the light, not of a continuing story about God and Israel within the ongoing flow of world history, but of the much thinner, often dehistoricized world of Torah-piety.

Paul saw himself living at the ultimate turning point of history. His announcement of Jesus in that culture at that moment was itself, he would have claimed, part of the long-term divine plan.

History, I believe, brings us to the point where we are bound to say: there really was an empty tomb, and there really were sightings of Jesus, the same and yet transformed. History then says: so how do you explain that? It offers us no easy escapes at that point, no quick side-exits to the question.

It is that they learn to think of themselves as characters in the story of God and his people, whose earlier chapters set out characteristic lessons to be mastered by those who find themselves in the later chapters. But the overall point is this: they are in the same story, not a different story which happens to be parallel to another earlier one.

I am, of course, aware that for over two hundred years scholars have laboured to keep history and theology, or history and faith, at arm's length from one another. There is a good intention behind this move: each of these disciplines has its own proper shape and logic, and cannot simply be turned into a branch of the other.

A biblical commentary is first and foremost a work of history. But history is a matter of learning not only the tune but also the rhythm and the harmonies.

The gospels] are not merely antiquarian documents telling a strange story about a powerful but now long-gone moment of history. They are the moment of sunrise on a new morning, casting a strange glory over the landscape and inviting all readers to wake up, rub the sleep from their eyes, and come out to enjoy the fully dawned day and give themselves to its tasks.

Science studies the repeatable; history studies the unrepeatable.

The bullet that has hit us Muslims today left the gun centuries ago when we let the clergy decide that knowledge and education were not important.

To visit certain streets was to realise that only the sky remained unchanged there.

tarikh,siasate gozashte,va siasat,tarikhe hal ast

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

The past has no wholeness, it has been etiolated by revised explanations of it, trampled over by hindsight - all their lives.

You know history better than I do, you've been teaching all your life. Without real opposition you get dictators down the line. Idi, Amin, Mugabe. No democracy without opposition.

One of the many impressive things about The Way of Glory is how lightly it wears its scrupulous research. This fine novel invites you to lose yourself to the compelling character and tumultuous life of a young woman trying to find God and love at the heart of a crusade rooted in greed and hate. This is a remarkable debut by a writer to watch.

Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years and it's going to be our capital for eternity

Jerusalem has been our capital for 3,000 years. Beit El and Hebron have been our land for 3,600-3,700 years. Any Jew or Christian or Muslim can open a Bible and read it. You have it there.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Human women have been slapping men for being bastards for centuries. You were doing what comes naturally.

To be a legend, you generally had to be dead.