C. S. Lewis Quotes

The Bible is a history book.

That's what we have with the Old Testament and the New Testament: good storytelling.

When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane.

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

Once we truly grasp the message of the New Testament, it is impossible to read the Old Testament again without seeing Christ on every page, in every story, foreshadowed or anticipated in every event and narrative. The Bible must be read as a whole, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelation, letting promise and fulfillment guide or expectations for what we will find there.

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.

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Art.

Many expressions in the New Testament come naturally to the lips of all Protestants, and it furnishes the most pregnant and practical texts. There is no harmless dreaming, no wise speculation in it, but everywhere a substratum of good sense. It never reflects, but it repents. There is no poetry in it, we may say, nothing regarded in the light of beauty merely, but moral truth is its object. All mortals are convicted by its conscience.

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.

The New Testament is not new anymore' it's thousands of years old. It's time to start calling it the Less Old Testament.

I love the melodies in the Old Testament, how preachers highlight them when they read from the Scripture. But I was influenced forever by the New Testament. I love the Beatitudes, informing us that the meek shall inherit the earth.

The Passion narratives are the first pieces of the Gospels that were composed as a unity.

The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.

Women can perform many duties which are useful in the church, but they were not called for priesthood. We are not to be blamed for this because this is not our teaching, it is the, Biblical teaching. If you can find one single example in the Bible, whether in the Old Testament or in the New Testament, we are ready to accept it. We are not against the words of God. We accept the words of God. But we cannot add new teachings.

The habit of regarding the Bible as historically accurate dates only to the Protestant Reformation: That outlook has since passed to the Muslim world.

If you really think about it, if we begin to teach history exactly the way that it happened - good, bad, ugly, no matter what - I believe that we're going to find that we are closer, more connected than we are apart.

Even if you aren't a believer, there are incredible stories in the 'good book' that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is - and by the way, Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.

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.

The New Testament, they tell us, is founded upon the prophecies of the Old; if so, it must follow the fate of its foundation.

The NT, compared with the Old, is like a farce of one act.

Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

I studied scriptural interpretation, which is more about how people get meaning out of texts, looking at stuff in the Old Testament - Muslims, Christians, Jews, different interpretations of the same texts.

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