Quotes About New Testament

essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

If you go back to that psychological document we call the New Testament, you'll find that it says the devil is 'the father of lies. Now the shadow never lies; it's the ego that lies about its real motives. That's why successful psychotherapy, and any genuine religious conversion, requires absolute honesty about oneself.

Does not the New Testament exhort us to extend a hand to one who has fallen? Professor Sumner would have us place a foot on the fallen one as he lies prone and pitiable, the better to remain his superior.

The form of the text known as Byzantine is not quoted by writers of the first three Christian centuries, which suggests that it is a later form. Also it tends to combine readings (as a later harmonizing writer might do) when other texts have two different readings. Since the Byzantine text was widespread in later centuries (and therefore often called the "majority" text), it was used for the earliest printed editions of the Greek New Testament and underlies the King James Version.

The New Testament is clear: there is to be no merger of church and state until Christ returns and the kingdoms of this world become 'the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.' As [Francis] Schaeffer writes, we must not 'confuse the kingdom of God with our country... or wrap Christianity in our national flag.

Political readings can no longer skirt the implications of the cornerstone of New Testament faith—Jesus crucified as the justice of God.

Cumulatively, the sheer volume of papyrus and parchment under-girding sacred Scripture dwarf that of any other work in classical history. Consider, for example, Homer's Iliad, Bible to the ancient Greeks. While its manuscript numbers are singularly impressive—650 copies—this pales by comparison to the almost 6,000 Greek manuscript fragments undergirding the New Testament.

Whoever removes the Cross and its interpretation by the New Testament from the center, in order to replace it, for example, with the social commitment of Jesus to the oppressed as a new center, no longer stands in continuity with the apostolic faith.

I think the Greek New Testament is the strongest and most successful misreading of a great prior text in the entire history of influence.

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.

The New Testament persistently presses us upward, toward higher motives for being good.

It was no problem for me to say I came from another world and could go back and forth in time in my emphysemic old Tardis which was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. Problem? For me who believed in Guardian Angels and was convinced that pigs were possessed by devils after their New Testament encounter with God's son? It was easy and I loved it.

Scribes working throughout Christianity's first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament's discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.

Who, among Christians today, is a disciple of Jesus, in any substantive sense of the word "disciple"? A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice—a practitioner, even if only a beginner. The New Testament literature, which must be allowed to define our terms if we are ever to get our bearings in the Way with Christ, makes this clear.

Love, as Paul and the New Testament presents it, is not action—not even action with a special intention—but a source of action.

I believe one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.

New Testament passages make plain that this kingdom is not something to be "accepted" now and enjoyed later, but something to be entered now (Matt. 5:20; 18:3; John 3:3, 5). It is something that already has flesh-and-blood citizens (John 18:36; Phil. 3:20) who have been transformed into it (Col. 1:13) and are fellow workers in it (Col. 4:11).

Bart Ehrman, in Misquoting Jesus, reminds us that there are more variants among the ancient documents than there are words in the New Testament.

There it is. That is the source of women's inequality in the Middle East, the Western world, and every country infected with biblical belief. In the New Testament, Paul (or someone pretending to be Paul) pounces on this pretext for patriarchy:

In a sense, the rediscovery of the Nag Hammadi Library marks the resurrection of a more historical Jesus, an ecstatic rebel sage who preached enlightenment through rituals involving magical plants, and who is more analogous to the archetypal magician, than the pious ascetic and crucified savior that has come down to us through the Bible's New Testament.

Rome changed the New Testament catholicity (which purifies and sanctifies as it's proper domain the whole of life) and has substituted in its place a dualism which separates the supernatural from the natural.

Christianity today is so subnormal that if any Christian began to act like a normal New Testament Christian, he would be considered abnormal

The witness of which the New Testament passages speak is God's gift, not our accomplishment.

It seems to me clear from the whole New Testament that the Christian life has room both for a godly confidence and for a godly fear. The contrast between these is not a contradiction.