Quotes about Historical

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.

The twenty-seven books of the New Testament were all written within two generations of the time of Jesus--in other words, by the end of the first century at the latest--though most scholars would put most of them earlier than that.

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.

here are other proposals regularly advanced as rival explanations to the early Christian one: 1. Jesus didn't really die; someone gave him a drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.

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.

Historical argument alone cannot force anyone to believe that Jesus was raised from teh dead, but historical argument is remarkably good at clearing away the undergrowth behind which skepticism of various sorts have long been hiding.

Worldliness is always a spiritual myopia. It falls for the spirit and system of the age and fails to correct itself through the correcting lenses of the perspective of the global (the Church in other continents), the historical (the Church in other centuries), and above all, the eternal (the Word of God across all places and times). Over

So, interpretation must proceed wholly by fitting those authors into their social and historical environments. Anything else is alleged to be a denial of history or a denial of humanity.

In this present book, we are taking what Christian philosopher Gary Habermas, in another context, calls "the minimalist facts approach." We are only going to say what can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. We are not going to present a hagiography of George Washington, i.e., we will not make him into an ecclesiastical saint. But we do believe that his own words and actions show that he was a Christian and not an unbelieving Deist.

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.

We get something out of them only by wrestling with their "historical particularity" (as some put it) and then doing the hard work of accepting the sacred responsibility of discerning how all of that works out here and now in whatever situation we find ourselves.

The point of all this is that the book of Exodus as we know it simply could not be as old as the thirteenth century BCE, and could not have been written by Moses.