James C. Maxwell Quotes

The Biblical text does not have punctuation marks like periods and question marks. Where we end sentences is a matter of interpretation.

It is that of increasing knowledge of empirical fact, intimately combined with changing interpretations of this body of fact - hence changing general statements about it - and, not least, a changing a structure of the theoretical system.

I really don't teach the way Professor [Frank Moore] Cross does. I don't teach the text the same way he does. I teach Biblical themes, Biblical events.

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.

Judaism is in a sense a Rabbinic, Talmudic religion, rather than a Biblical religion.

For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

The value of the Old Testament may be dependant on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way-to find the Word in it...to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God's gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.

The argument that the literal story of Genesis can qualify as science collapses on three major grounds: the creationists' need to invoke miracles in order to compress the events of the earth's history into the biblical span of a few thousand years; their unwillingness to abandon claims clearly disproved, including the assertion that all fossils are products of Noah's flood; and their reliance upon distortion, misquote, half-quote, and citation out of context to characterize the ideas of their opponents.

I believe people have different ways of approaching the Word. For me, it's metaphor, written by people a long time after Christ died and interpreted by specific groups. I read the gospels that aren't included in the Bible. These make me feel good about calling myself a Christian.

Saint Augustine ... insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.

The Bible is interpreted by the Talmud. Except, in Rabbinic tradition, a Talmudic law has the weight of the Biblical law. Sometimes we say in a prayer, "Blessed are Thou, O God, who has ordered us and commended us," to do something. But you don't find that "something" in the Bible; you find it in the Talmud. So Talmudic law becomes as important as Biblical law.

It's time for a new Reformation in the Church--to call the Church back to the authority of the Word of God, beginning in Genesis.

And though St. John saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators.

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.

Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

And this manner of speaking of the Almighty, as one would speak of a man, is consistent with nothing but the stupidity of the Bible.

Think of a hypothesis as a card. A theory is a house made of hypotheses.

Let the gentleman go to Revelation to learn the decree of God - let him go to the Bible. . . . I said that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible, authorized, regulated, and recognized from Genesis to Revelation. . . . Slavery existed then in the earliest ages, and among the chosen people of God; and in Revelation we are told that it shall exist till the end of time shall come. You find it in the Old and New Testaments - in the prophecies, psalms, and the epistles of Paul; you find it recognized - sanctioned everywhere.

Science is a way of equipping yourself with the tools to interpret what happens in front of you.

The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.

Most good evangelical Study Bibles have more in common than people sometimes realize. All of them are committed to explaining the Bible to lay readers.

No language exists that cannot be misused... Every Interpretation is hypothetical, for it is a mere attempt to read an unfamiliar text.

The Bible takes much of its color from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous.