Madalyn Murray O'Hair Quotes

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.

I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries.

Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.

I think if you place Jesus firmly in the historical context... you can make very educated hypotheses and guesses about how he lived.

Could the one whom Christians worship be merely a mythological creation, or is he real? These questions have exercised many great minds and have been the dominant issue in New Testament studies during this century.

The earliest books in the New Testament to be written were the Epistles, not the Gospels. It's almost as though Saint Paul and others who wrote the Epistles weren't that interested in whether Jesus was real.

I've done some analysis of the biblical stories as part of my psychological work. I knew that I had more to do, and every time I've done it, it's been extremely valuable. It makes me a better teacher because I have a richer understanding of cultural history.

You accept the historical Jesus?

Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him.

All we know about Jesus is what someone else wrote down... so really one should say, "Here is what someone wrote down that they said Jesus said..." this isn't uncertainty on purpose, just plain speaking.

We didn't really differ [with Frank Moore Cross] because we have the same love of the text. We share that love.

The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. ... But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own... He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.

If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity.

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.

Jesus Christ is the only God who has a date in history.

Remove Christ from the Scriptures and there is nothing left.

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs.

[My approach to the Bible, history does really matter.] Everything matters. But I have priorities. For instance, for me to know whether there were two Isaiahs or one is less important than the text itself. Of course I read the arguments for and against. But it's not my task in life to say there were two or three authors of Isaiah's book, or how many authors there were of Deuteronomy. This is not what I'm doing.

you [priests] are called 'another Christ.'

We ought to reverence books; to look on them as useful and mighty things. If they are good and true, whether they are about religion, politics, farming, trade, law, or medicine, they are the message of Christ, the maker of all things - the teacher of all truth.

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.

All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him.

In the New Testament, Thomas Jefferson cut out everything that was mystical, magical, miracle - physically with scissors - and then pasted in all that remained, such as Jesus's Sermon on the Mount.

Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.

That day, Miss Mdingane told me that my new name was Nelson. Why she bestowed this particular name upon me I have no idea. Perhaps it had something to do with the great British sea captain Lord Nelson, but that would be only a guess.