Quotes about Historical

It flows out of the point I just made. Christians believe that as wonderful as Jesus' life and teachings and miracles were, they were meaningless if it were not historically factual that Christ died and was raised from the dead and that this provided atonement, or forgiveness, of the sins of humanity.

myth" in this strict sense is a story that purports to be in some sense "historical" and that encapsulates and reinforces the strongly held beliefs of the community that tells it.

I have argued that the God of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels, can be understood only as God-in-public, and that methods of criticism designed to keep this rumor quiet need to be challenged by appropriate historical, theological, and political critique and replaced by methods that do justice to the reality of the texts and hence do justice - in the much fuller sense - in the public world that the Gospels demand to address.

Early testimony supports historical claims. The closer the time between the event and testimony about it, the more reliable the witness, since there is less time for exaggeration, and even legend, to creep into the account.

If one discards the Bible as unreliable historically, then he or she must discard all the literature of antiquity. No other document has as much evidence to confirm its reliability.

Second, I have taken it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth existed. Some writers feel a need to justify this assumption at length against people who try from time to time to deny it. It would be easier, frankly, to believe that Tiberius Caesar, Jesus' contemporary, was a figment of the imagination than to believe that there never was such a person as Jesus. Those who persist in denying this obvious point will probably not want to read a book like this anyway.

Christ is God, and Jesus is the Christ's historical manifestation in time.

Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That's concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened 'once upon a time.

The Babylon whose fall is described is then not merely the historical Babylon, Israel's conqueror, but also the symbolic Babylon. Its fall signifies the dethroning of every power opposed to God.

Deism, historically, produces atheism. First you make God a landlord, then an absent landlord, then he becomes simply absent.

Seeing the similarities between these two stories should discourage us from expecting the Adam story to contribute to contemporary scientific debates about human origins (let alone guide those debates). Likewise, the similarities between Genesis and Atrahasis suggest that the biblical account cannot be labeled "historical," at least not in any conventional sense of the word.