Julius Wellhausen Quotes

Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.

One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.

Pastors need to know what's going on in the world and what has been going on for 4,000 years. We need a way to read Scripture which is imaginative, interpretive.

As delineated in the biblical book of Leviticus, Israel's atonement was achieved, year after year, through the sacrifices brought on that day by the high priest.

I deal with more practical issues of the Bible.

We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

There's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Qur'an, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bible, there's no way you can misunderstand the teachings of the Bhaghavad Gita, or of the Book of Mormon, or of the other sacred texts of many of those religions.

Yes, I think that when the Bible refers to a horse or a horseman, that's exactly what it means.

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

The Psalms, the anthology of the hymns of Israel, are still used by Christians.

For the earliest period of the history of Israel, all that precedes the building of the temple, not a trace can be found of any sanctuary of exclusive legitimacy.

For every Book of Job, there's a Book of Leviticus, featuring some of the most boring prose ever written. But if you were stranded on a desert island, what book would better reward long study? And has there ever been a more beautiful distillation of existential philosophy than the Book of Ecclesiastes?

When I visited Israel for the first time, in 2014, on a trip sponsored by the National Religious Broadcasters, I went to the Museum of The Bible with our group. There, we saw the most ancient and original versions of both the Hebrew and Christian bibles.

The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by the church and the Sabbath school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It was hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor. [...] It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians.

I've probably read maybe by now fifteen, twenty books on Matthew. I'd say the authors I like best are an English fellow named Michael Goulder, who taught at the University of Birmingham in England, and he writes about the Jewish background in Matthew's gospel, which is part of what I was just talking about, which is just really thrilling to me.

Paul's words are not the Words of God. They are the words of Paul- a vast difference.

Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated

The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.

It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?

People take things too literal in the Bible and it's totally wrong.

Let the Bible be the Bible. It's not about science. It's not accurate history. It is a grab bag of religious fantasies written by many authors. Some of its myths, like the Star of Bethlehem, are very beautiful. Others are dull and ugly. Some express lofty ideals, such as the parables of Jesus. Others are morally disgusting.

I can quote you lots of chapters in verse from the bible that are terrible for women. But you can use the bible to either liberate or subjugate women. And it's the same with the Koran.

You have to understand that the Bible is really a library of books and it has different categories of material. There are certain parts which you have to say no to. The Bible accepted slavery. St Paul said women should not speak in church at all and there are people who have used that to say women should not be ordained. There are many things that you shouldn't accept.