Quotes About Interpretation

this is not reading the Bible as a book. It is using the Bible as a kind of Christian Ouija board.

these sources were not intending to present what we think of as historically accurate information; that's a modern imposition on these Gospels that they can't bear.

Christian followers of Jesus who knew about Apollonius maintained that he was a charlatan and a fraud; in response, the pagan followers of Apollonius asserted that Jesus was the charlatan and fraud. Both groups could point to the authoritative written accounts of their leader's life to score their debating points.

The idea of the rapture has not been taken from the Bible; it has been read into the Bible.

But the historian is no more able to pronounce on ultimate "truth" than anyone else. That is to say, historians cannot decide who is right in the question of whether there is one God or two; they can simply show what different people have thought at different times.

For now my point is that most readers don't see these differences because they have been trained, or at least are inclined, to read the Bible in only one way, vertically, whereas the historical approach suggests that it is also useful to read it another way, horizontally.

We remember the past not only as it actually happened but also in light of what is important to us in our own lives. (8)

If you accept the Bible, you should accept it for what it is: a document of faith that is not a history book.

But the reality is that most of these symbols would have been quite simple for anyone at the time to discern, whether a devoted Christian or a Roman pagan.

I have often wondered what would have happened if Paul and Matthew had been locked up in a room together and told they could not come out until they had hammered out a consensus statement on how followers of Jesus were to deal with the Jewish law. Would they ever have emerged, or would they still be there, two skeletons locked in a death grip? If

What if the book you take as giving you God's words instead contains human words?

Whether you are a believer—fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, liberal—or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the history of our civilization.

It is because in John's Gospel we are not hearing two voices—the voice of Jesus and the voice of the narrator. We are hearing one voice. The author is speaking for himself and he is speaking for Jesus. These are not Jesus's words; they are John's words placed on Jesus's lips.

That's not how authors, ancient or modern, work. Authors write for readers in their own time and place.

there is nothing objectively that makes objectivity objectively true)

especially what it has to say to me personally or to my society.

In fact, the Gospels disagree on nearly every detail in their resurrection narratives.

in fact it is very difficult to find any instance in which he actually did what the law forbade. What he violated was the understanding and interpretation of the law by other Jewish leaders of his day, especially the Pharisees, who had developed complex rules to be adopted in order to be sure the law was kept.

The Pharisees were not hypocritical in developing these rules: they simply believed that one should do everything possible to do what God had required and so formulated policies to help make that happen.)

each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours.

Arguably it is also the most thoroughly misunderstood, especially by the lay reading public.

Give Gnostic scholars a new Gnostic text filled with aeons and cosmic mysteries and they think they're in hog heaven.

It was clear to me that this newly discovered Gospel of Judas could be one of two things. Its importance and the breadth of its appeal would depend entirely on which of these two things it was.

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.