Historicity Of The Bible Quotes

...if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. ~ Michael Grant

The most 'authoritative' accounts of a historical Jesus come from the four canonical Gospels of the Bible. Note that these Gospels did not come into the Bible as original and authoritative from the authors themselves, but rather from the influence of early church fathers, especially the most influential of them all: Irenaeus of Lyon who lived in the middle of the second century. Many heretical gospels existed by that time, but Irenaeus considered only some of them for mystical reasons. He claimed only four in number; according to Romer, 'like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures
the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, the eagle of John. ~ Frank Butcher

While many have doubted the accuracy of the Bible, time and continued research have consistently demonstrated that the Word of God is better informed than its critics. In fact, while thousands of finds from the ancient world support in broad outline and often in detail the biblical picture, not one incontrovertible find has ever contradicted the Bible. ~ Norman Geisler

My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. ~ Phil Robertson

No book in the world today comes to us in the particular way that the Bible comes to us, exactly where we are, in our exact predicament. In other words, this third chapter of the book of Genesis is absolutely essential to a true understanding of life, the whole of life as it is at this moment for each individual. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

There is only one writer in whom I find something that reminds me of the directness of style which is found in the Bible. It is Shakespeare. ~ Heinrich Heine

The Bible stresses that a marriage ideally should be a picture or a reflection of Christ's love for His people. ~ Billy Graham

The one true Church is composed of all believers in the Lord Jesus. It is made up of all Gods elect-of all converted men and women-of all true Christians. It is a Church of which all the members have the same marks. They are born of the Spirit; they all possess "repentance towards God, faith towards our Lord Jesus Christ", and holiness of life and conversation. They all hate sin, and they all love Christ. They all worship with one heart. They are all led by one Spirit; they all build upon one foundation; they all draw their religion from one single Book-that is the Bible. They are all joined to one great center-that is Jesus Christ. They all, even now, can say with one heart, "Hallelujah"; and they can all respond with one heart and voice, "Amen and Amen". It is a Church which is dependent upon no ministers upon earth, however much it values those who preach the Gospel to its members. ~ J.C. Ryle

Any sermon that tells listeners only how they should live without putting that standard into the context of the gospel gives them the impression that they might be complete enough to pull themselves together if they really try hard. Ed Clowney points out that if we ever tell a particular Bible story without putting it into the Bible story (about Christ), we actually change its meaning for us. It becomes a moralistic exhortation to "try harder" rather than a call to live by faith in the work of Christ. There are, in the end, only two ways to read the Bible: Is it basically about me or basically about Jesus? In other words, is it basically about what I must do or basically about what he has done? ~ Timothy Keller

I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it. ~ Ken Follett

I lived in a picture perfect subdivision with color coordinated houses and mailboxes, yellow labs prancing within the borders of invisible electric fences, and balding dads on riding lawn mowers. It was the type of community where housewives spent their summers tanning by the pool, half-heartedly watching their Ritalin pumped brat beat another brat with a foam noodle while rehashing Sunday's Bible study between whispers of Susie's weight gain and Dan's canoodling with the babysitter. ~ Maggie Young

You can learn from anybody if you just know the right questions. The Bible says, "Counsel in the heart of man is like deep water; but a man of understanding will draw it out" (Prov. 20:5 KJV). In other words, you can learn from anybody if you just learn to draw out his or her knowledge. And how do you do it? You draw it out by asking questions. We all know things that others don't, and others know things of which we are ignorant. That's why the Bible says, "Iron sharpens iron" (Prov. 27:17). ~ John Piper

The Bible is full of ordinary people who went to impossible places and did wondrous things simply because they decided to obey God. ~ Andrew Van Der Bijl

The reason, the Bible says, is because Satan will lash out in one final burst of fury, seeking with all his might to block Christ's victory. Does this alarm you? Don't let it - because Christ, not Satan, will be victorious. In the meantime, "be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer" (Romans 12:12 NIV). ~ Billy Graham

Bear patiently your exile and the dryness of your mind. The time will come when I will make you forget these painful moments and you will enjoy inward quietness. I will open the Bible for you and you will be thrilled by your new understanding of my truth. ~ Thomas A Kempis

You can't make a worm understand the language of a bear. ~ Gillian Duce

hundred miles west and one would be out of the "Bible Belt," that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces, but in Finney County one is still within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person's church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status. ~ Truman Capote

There are any number of people who profess to be good Christian people who are willing to believe all kinds of things on suspicion. Now that is not the way the Bible directs for Christian people to do. ~ John Harvey Kellogg

The deeper you go into the Word of God, the more light you will receive for your life and the wiser you will be in your actions. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I like to read biographies of authors that I love, like Richard Yates. I also like to see what non-fiction authors are out there. My bible is Something Happened. It's one of the greatest books I've ever read. But if I don't read a Dostoevsky soon I'm going to kill myself. ~ Richard Lewis

My friends knew that I was reading the Bible. First, the dean of the chapel took me out to lunch and shared his belief that the Old Testament was dispensable and, with it, any prohibition about sexuality and immorality. But I had been reading and studying the three different narratives of the Old Testament, and it seemed to me that you couldn't dispense with it in its entirety without violating a foundational rule about canonicity: no creating canons within canons. In fact, I had just gone over this in my graduate seminar in Queer Theory and it made me wonder if the chapel dean ought not sit in on my class. His position seemed like a hermeneutic of convenience, tailoring the text to fit my experience, and not a hermeneutic of integrity, where the text gets the chance to fulfill its internal mission. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Planned Parenthood is teaching kids to fornicate, teaching people to have adultery, every kind of bestiality, homosexuality, lesbianism - everything that the Bible condemns. ~ Pat Robertson

In fact, there are all sorts of great institutions and human enterprises that the Bible doesn't address or regulate. And so we are free to invent them and operate them in line with the general principles for human life that the Bible gives us. But marriage is different. As the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship says, God "established marriage for the welfare and happiness of humankind." Marriage did not evolve in the late Bronze Age as a way to determine property rights. At the climax of the Genesis account of creation we see God bringing a woman and a man together to unite them in marriage. The Bible begins with a wedding (of Adam and Eve) and ends in the book of Revelation with a wedding (of Christ and the church). Marriage is God's idea. ~ Timothy Keller

It is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that there is a vast quantity of so-called Christianity nowadays, which you cannot declare positively unsound - but which, nevertheless, is not full measure, good weight and sixteen ounces to the pound. It is a Christianity in which there is undeniably "something about Christ, and something about grace, and something about faith, and something about repentance, and something about holiness," but it is not the real "thing as it is" in the Bible. Things are out of place and out of proportion. As old Latimer would have said, it is a kind of "mingle-mangle," and does no good. It neither . . . exercises influence on daily conduct, nor comforts in life, nor gives peace in death. And those who hold it often awake too late to find that they have got nothing solid under their feet. ~ J.C. Ryle

Christianity finds all its doctrines stated in the Bible, and Christianity denies no part, nor attempts to add anything to the Word of God. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

Shaping someone's understanding of the things of God is a huge responsiblity, and it is not to be taken lightly. ~ Jen Wilkin

In the same way, metrics can record the frequency of our church attendance, the regularity of our Bible reading and the exact amount of our tithing, but they can never gauge the genuineness of any of them, or whether they are any better than "the noise of the solemn assemblies" against which the prophets fulminated. ~ Os Guinness

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I went from one state of life to another state of life by obeying, understanding, and applying the principles that are laid down in the Bible. ~ Myles Munroe

I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. ~ Wendell Berry

Since dictating the Bible, and hiring a perfect race of ministers to explain it, God has never done much but creep around and try to catch us disobeying it. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The Bible isn't an answer book. It isn't a self-help manual. It isn't a flat, perspicuous list of rules and regulations that we can interpret objectively and apply unilaterally to our lives. The Bible is a sacred collection of letters and laws, poetry and proverbs, philosophy and prophecies, written and assembled over thousands of years in cultures and contexts very different from our own, that tells the complex, ever-unfolding story of God's interaction with humanity. ~ Rachel Held Evans

What we call creation science makes no reference to the Bible. It says there are two possible explanations for the origin of the universe and living things: theistic, supernatural creation by an intelligent being, or nontheistic, mechanistic evolutionary theory that posits no goal and no purpose in the evolutionary process. We just happen to be here. ~ Duane Gish

In the Jewish tradition of the Bible it says, "Speak to her softly, so that she will want to engage in sexual activity." In today's world, there's a little bit of a danger in that people don't really talk to each other. You see couples walking in the street, each one of them texting someone else. That worries me. ~ Ruth Westheimer

The true Christian was intended by Christ to prove all things by the Word of God: all churches, all ministers, all teaching, all preaching, all doctrines, all sermons, all writings, all opinions, all practices. These are his marching orders. Prove all by the Word of God; measure all by the measure of the Bible; compare all with the standard of the Bible; weigh all in the balances of the Bible; examine all by the light of the Bible; test all in the crucible of the Bible. That which cannot abide the fire of the Bible, reject, refuse, repudiate, and cast away. This is the flag which he nailed to the mast. May it never be lowered! ~ John Wycliffe

I am in a two-stoplight town in the Alabama hill country, in the heart of the Bible Belt and Crimson Tide football mania, listening to an old-fashioned, heated argument between Cubans like the ones I've heard in Little Havana in Miami, but the moment very quickly loses its sense of strangeness and cultural dissonance. This is what America is like now
North America, I mean, the United States. The craziness of cubanos and mexicanos and guatemaltecos can find you just about anywhere ~ Hector Tobar

Stand in the divine rain, and seeds of wisdom will grow in your soul. ~ Peter Kreeft

The vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision's greatest enemy . Both read the Bible day and night, but thou read'st black where I read white. His seventy disciples sent against religion and government . ~ William Blake

he guessed they all knew what he'd done and counted him foolish for blatantly going against their boss. Well, he reasoned as he dropped his jacket over the high back of his chair, there was a Bible verse about the world's wisdom being foolish in the sight of God. ~ Kim Vogel Sawyer

O Word of God incarnate ...
It is the golden casket
Where gems of truth are stored;
It is the heaven-drawn picture
Of Thee, the Living Word. ~ Walsham How

The Rough Beast snorted. "You don't get it at all, buddy. It's not about wrestling. It's about stories. We're storytellers."
Caperton studied him. "Somebody at my job just said that."
"It's true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing
public space? I prefer private space, but that's cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn't a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe."
"But doesn't it seem kind of creepy?" Caperton said. "All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?"
The Rough Beast shrugged. "Well, you can be negative. That's the easy way out. ~ Sam Lipsyte