Quotes
on Bible - The main method of meditation
“Luke
has interspersed with an account of the nativity of John the Baptist (no doubt obtained
from the rival sect of John) a parallel nativity of Jesus built on John's
model. Not that Luke himself was the one who composed it; it, too, was most
likely pre-Lukan material. [...] Though Luke used prior sources, probably in
Aramaic, for the nativities of John and Jesus, it appears he himself
contributed bits of connective text to bring the two parallel stories into a
particular relationship so that John should be subordinated to Jesus, whom Luke
makes Jesus' elder cousin. This original, redactional material is Luke 1:36,
39-45, 56. It consists of a visit of Mary to her cousin Elizabeth, whereupon
the fetus John, already in possession of clairvoyant gifts, leaps in the womb
to acknowledge the greater glory of the messianic zygote. All this is blatantly
legendary, or there is no such thing as a legend. Luke probably got the idea
from Gen. 25:22, where according to the Greek translation of the Old Testament,
the Septuagint, Rebecca is painfully pregnant with twins. [...] In this way
Luke tries to harmonize the competing traditions of Jesus and John, whose
cousinhood is no doubt his own invention.”
―
Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the
Gospel Tradition?
“That
is not the only trajectory along which the baptism narrative grew and evolved.
The Markan version itself began to afford new embarrassments as Christian
history progressed. After all, John's was a baptism for repenting sinners! What
on earth was Jesus doing there? [...] Apparently, Mark saw nothing amiss. After
all, it is a good thing to repent, isn't it? The same humility that led Jesus
to wade into the Jordan that day also bade him deflect the polite flattery of a
wellwisher in Mark 10:17-18. "Why do you call me good? No one is good but
God alone!" Needless to say, the thought never entered Mark's head that
Jesus might be an incarnation of God. That is a later stage of Christology, and
when theologians arrived there, Mark 10:17-18 became a headache for which no
cure has yet been found.”
―
Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the
Gospel Tradition?
“The
average reader of the New Testament reads Matthew before Mark and then goes on
to Luke and John. Matthew gives him the impression that Jesus was born God's
Son in a miraculous fashion. Mark begins only with the baptism, but the reader
will think little of this: perhaps Mark begins in medias res. With Luke we are
back to a miraculous nativity for one born the Son of God. In John the reader
learns that Jesus had already been God's Son from all eternity. But suppose one
read Mark by itself, as its first readers did. What impression would one
receive? Surely in a book where the main character shows up as an adult and,
right off the bat, experiences a vision of divine calling in which he and no
one else is told that he is God's Son, the natural inference would be that the
baptism was the beginning of an honorific Sonship. If he were already God's
son, wouldn't he have known it? And then why should God tell him what he
already knew? It seems that Mark might believe what others in the early church
did, namely, in Jesus' adoptive Sonship. Ebionite Jewish Christians and
Cerinthian (also Jewish) Gnostics were adoptionists, rejecting any miraculous
generation of Jesus Christ from the deity. [...] Once we know this was a
popular, though eventually controversial, option among early Christians, it
begins to make a new sense that the earliest gospel, Mark, sounds adoptionist
but is flanked and overwhelmed by subsequent gospels that have moved the
Sonship further and further back, attributing to Jesus some degree of divine
nature in the process.”
―
Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the
Gospel Tradition?
“The
Synoptic gospels agree that after being baptized, Jesus was driven by the
Spirit, to which he was newly sensitive, out into the desert to be tested or
tempted (same Greek word) by Satan. [...] "Satan," originally not a
proper name but a title, "the Adversary," was a servant of God, a
kind of security chief who occasionally urged the Almighty to take a second
look at his favorites about whose character the Satan harbored some doubts.
[...] Thus, in the Gospels it seems only natural that Jesus, newly commissioned
as God's Son, should be put through his paces by the Satan to determine whether
he is really up to the job. That is the point of the taunt, "If you are
the Son of God...." Does Jesus understand what that entails? In the same
way, Luke will later (22:31-32) portray Satan, again in character, as
demanding, as is his right, to sift the twelve disciples like wheat, the same
task as the Baptist ascribes to the Coming One, and they fail the test. Peter
unwittingly acts the role of the Adversary when he tests Jesus' resolve to go
forward with the crucifixion (Mark 8:32-33). Satan becomes the enemy of God and
the champion of evil only insofar as he becomes mixed with other ancient
characters like Beelzebul the Ekronite oraclegod (Matt. 12:24, 26; 2 Kings
1:2), Leviathan the Chaos Dragon (Ps. 74:13-14; Rev. 12:3 ff.), and Ahriman the
Zoroastrian antigod (2 Cor. 4:4; Luke 10:17-19).”
―
Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the
Gospel Tradition?
“The
main method of meditation as outlined by Rabbi Abraham, thus involves the
contemplation of nature. A person can contemplate the greatness of the sea,
marveling at the many creatures that live in it. One can gaze at a clear night
sky, allowing his mind to be completely absorbed by the glory of the stars.
Through such intense contemplation, one can attain a meditative state directed
toward the Divine. This is seen as the level of Aseph, one of the co-authors of
the Psalms, who purified his heart and mind, cleansing it of all things other
than the Divine. It is regarding this state that he said, "My flesh and
heart fade away," When he divorced his consciousness from everything but
God, he said, "Who have I in heaven? And with You, I have no desire on
earth" (Psalm 73)”
―
Aryeh Kaplan, Meditation and the Bible
“Dear
church people: I was today years old when I learned to stop being bothered by
people who defend and side with those who continue to do wrong against me.
Chances are, they are they are wrong as well and that's why they defend it.”
―
Niedria D. Kenny
“Satan
doesn't even reign in hell! That's how powerless he is.”
―
Niedria D. Kenny
“It
is one thing for modern educated people to feel they must believe these old
stories as factual when science proves otherwise. It is quite another for
ancient people living before the dawn of scientific technology to venture
clever but inevitably mistaken explanations. My guess is that many secular
folks in our day take a dim view of biblical tales of a six-day creation, a
universal flood, etc., blaming these stories for the oppressive use of them by
religious leaders who ought to know better. But that’s not fair. Who, after
all, scorns and ridicules the Greek or the Norse myths? No one, because no one
catechizes us to believe these literally. They haven’t left a bad taste in our
mouths. Nor should the myths of Genesis.
If
we could somehow visit the past and explain to the authors of Genesis the true
origins of the earth and its life-forms, of languages, and of ethnicities, I
suspect they would rejoice to learn the truth of the matter.”
―
Robert M. Price, Holy Fable: The Old Testament Undistorted by Faith
“Do
not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,
so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”
―
Romans 12.2
“Behold,
I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I
will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”
―
Revelation 3:20 (ESV)
“It
is also striking and worth noting that this apocalyptic message comes to be
toned down, and then virtually eliminated, and finally preached against
(allegedly by Jesus!) in our later sources. And it is not hard to figure out
why. If Jesus predicted that the imminent apocalypse would arrive within his
own generation, before his disciples had all died, what was one to think a
generation later when in fact it had not arrived? One might conclude that Jesus
was wrong. But if one wanted to stay true to him, one might change the message
that he proclaimed so that he no longer spoke about the coming apocalypse. So
it is no accident that our final canonical Gospel, John, written after that
first generation, no longer has Jesus proclaim an apocalyptic message. He
preaches something else entirely. Even later, in a book like the Gospel of
Thomas, Jesus preaches directly against an apocalyptic point of view (sayings
2, 113). As time went on, the apocalyptic message came to be seen as misguided,
or even dangerous. And so the traditions of Jesus’s preaching were changed. But
in our earliest multiply attested sources, there it is for all to see.”
―
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God
“Jesus
is shown healing the blind in Mark 8:22-26. This episode is especially
remarkable in that it has Jesus employ common magical healing techniques
("Here's mud in your eye!"), something Matthew and Luke did not care
for and so omitted. Equally notable is the fact that the healed man does not
recover his sight all at once. Jesus has to try again before sight is fully
restored. Some critics have understood this detail as symbolic of the two
stages of the awakening of the disciples' faith. They see the truth clearly
enough to heed Jesus' call to follow, and yet they have no understanding of his
divine fate till the end. Their spiritual blindness, then, would have cleared
up in two stages. If we accept this interpretation, we are pretty much saying
Mark created the detail. [...] My guess is that it is a Markan creation,
drawing upon magical techniques that were commonenough knowledge in order to
make it seem authentic. He thought no more of having Jesus have to try again
than he did of having him repent in baptism. His Christology was not
"high" enough for any of this to be an embarrassment [...] Matthew
would never have created such a story, true, but Mark saw nothing wrong with
it.”
―
Robert M. Price, The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the
Gospel Tradition?
“Mark
was certainly written after 70 (the year the Jerusalem temple was destroyed),
but how long after is an open question We really have no evidence that Mark was
written any earlier than 100, in fact, so it's simply presumption really that
puts his Gospel in the first century. [...] Nothing is known of the author.
Late tradition claims he was Peter's secretary, but there is no reason to trust
that information, and it seems most unlikely. Mark is advocating against
Torah-observant Christianity (see Chapter 10, §5) and thus would have been
Peter's opponent, not representative. There is no evidence really that Matthew
was written in the 80s. Nothing is known of the author. We know 'Matthew' was
not an eyewitness, because he copies Mark verbatim and just modifies and adds
to him [...], which is not the behavior of a witness, but of a late literary
redactor. [...] John wrote after Luke-as almost everyone agrees [...] It could
have been written as late as the 140s (some argue even later) or as early as
the 100s (provided Luke was written in the 90s). [...] John was redacted
multiple times and thus had multiple authors. 32 Nothing is known of them.”
―
Richard C. Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for
Doubt
“The
idea that Jesus was raised on the third day is not necessarily a historical
recollection of when the resurrection happened, but a theological claim of its
significance. I should point out that the Gospels do not indicate on which day
Jesus was raised. [...] this “third day” is said to have been in accordance
with the testimony of scripture, which for any early Christian author would not
have been the New Testament (which had not yet been written) but the Hebrew
Bible. There is a widespread view among scholars that the author of this
statement is indicating that in his resurrection on the third day Jesus is
thought to have fulfilled the saying of the Hebrew prophet Hosea: “After two
days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live
before him” (Hos. 6:2). Other scholars—a minority of them, although I find
myself attracted to this view—think that the reference is to the book of Jonah,
[...] Jesus himself is recorded in the Gospels as likening his upcoming death
and resurrection to “the sign of Jonah” (Matt. 12:39–41). Whether the reference
is to Hosea or Jonah, why would it be necessary to say that the resurrection
happened on the third day? Because that is what was predicted in scripture.
This is a theological claim that Jesus’s death and resurrection happened
according to plan.”
―
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from
Galilee
“For
many years scholars have considered it highly significant that Paul, our
earliest “witness” to the resurrection, says nothing about the discovery of an
empty tomb. Our earliest account of Jesus’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:3–5)
discusses the appearances without mentioning an empty tomb, while our earliest
Gospel, Mark, narrates the discovery of the empty tomb without discussing any
of the appearances (Mark 16:1–8). This has led some scholars, such as New
Testament expert Daniel Smith, to suggest that these two sets of tradition—the
empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death—probably originated
independently of one another and were put together as a single tradition only
later—for example, in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. If this is the case,
then the stories of Jesus’s resurrection were indeed being expanded,
embellished, modified, and possibly even invented in the long process of their
being told and retold over the years.”
―
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God
“Woe
to them, for they have strayed from me!
Ruin
to them, for they have rebelled against me!
Though
I wished to redeem them,
they
spoke lies against me.
They
have not cried to me from their hearts
when
they wailed upon their beds;
For
wheat and wine they lacerated themselves;
they
rebelled against me.”
―
Anonymous
“He
gave me a new German translation of the Bible and opened it to the first page.
There I read again and again:
'Und
die Erde war Wirrnis und Wüste. Finsternis allüber Abgrund. Braus Gottes
brütend allüber den Wassern.'
It
could have been written about me, I thought. I thought that the beginning had
been like this and I kept on hearing these words sound in my heart.”
―
Lili Elbe, Lili: A Portrait of the First Sex Change
“ONE
OF THE MOST interesting features of the early Christian debates over orthodoxy
and heresy is the fact that views that were originally [...] deemed orthodox
came to be declared heretical. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of
the first heretical view of Christ—the view that denies his divinity. [...] the
very first Christians held to exaltation Christologies which maintained that
the man Jesus (who was nothing more than a man) had been exalted to the status
and authority of God. The earliest Christians thought that this happened at his
resurrection; eventually, some Christians came to believe it happened at his
baptism. Both views came to be regarded as heretical by the second century CE,
[...] It is not that the second-century “heresy-hunters” among the Christian
authors attacked the original Christians for these views. Instead, they
attacked the people of their own day for holding them; and in their attacks
they more or less “rewrote history,” by claiming that such views had never been
held by the apostles at the beginning or by the majority of Christians ever.”
―
Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from
Galilee
“The
main difference between someone weak in Faith and someone strong in Faith is
what they think in their heart and what comes out of their mouth”
―
Vince Baker, Faith Secrets: Learn How To Please God With Your Faith
