Josh McDowell Quotes

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

I do not read the ancient languages, but I am beginning to study Greek.

In some Old Testament books, it's very evident that an editor has been at work. That's quite all right. It's part of the process.

With us [Jews] it is not open to everybody to write the records …. The prophets alone had the privilege obtaining the knowledge of the most remote and ancient history through the inspiration which they owed to God….We do not possess myriads of inconsistent books conflicting with one another.

It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.

I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.

You can't cast Hittites as Trojans; I'd love to do it, but sadly, there are none available!

With the history of Moses no book in the world, in point of antiquity, can contend.

What would become of history, had we not a dependence on the veracity of the historian, according to the experience, what we have had of mankind?

Biblical archaeology was developed early in this century in an effort to substantiate the authenticity of the Biblical account. It's by now generally recognized in Biblical scholarship that it has done the opposite. The Bible is not a historical text, and has only vague resemblances to what took place, as far as can be reconstructed. For example, whether Israel ever existed is not clear; if so, it was probably a small kingdom somewhere in the hills, apparently virtually unknown to the Egyptians.

Scholars have found that references to Christ in Josephus were deliberately planted in the translation long after it was written, and the Latin references to Christ are not to a person of that name. In the Dead Sea Scrolls there was mention of a particular "teacher of righteousness" who had characteristics somewhat like those attributed to Christ, but it might easily have been someone else.

The Book of Job and the 19th Psalm, which even the Church admits to be more ancient than the chronological order in which they stand in the book called the Bible, are theological orations conformable to the original system of theology.

Let it simply be said that we know more about the details of the hours immediately before and the actual death of Jesus, in and near Jerusalem, than we know about the death of any other one man in all the ancient world.

For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only.

People don't alter history any more than birds alter the sky, they just make brief patterns in it.

Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Tutankhamun was not black, and the portrayal of ancient Egyptian civilization as black has no element of truth to it.

...my soul always reverts to the Old Testament and to Shakespeare. There at least one feels that it's human beings talking. There people hate, people love, people murder their enemy and curse his descendants through all generations, there people sin.

Here we are signing autographs for people who essentially know know how to write their name and are functionally literate. But if you cease to teach cursive writing, how does one know how to, I don’t know, replicate the Declaration of Independence? Or the orations of Cicero? Is it just going to be on the internet?

I had always been an enthusiastic reader of stuff about ancient Greece. I would read Herodotus and Thucydides just for fun.

The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.

Luke [the gospel writer] screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius - a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole - but it happened too late in 6 AD, long after Herod's death.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

In the history of the world the Vedas fill a gap which no literary work in any other language could fill. I maintain that to everybody who cares for himself for his ancestors for his intellectual development a study of the Vedic literature is indeed indispensable.