Famous Bible Quotes

This was like no library I had ever seen because, well, there were no books. Actually, I take that back. There was one book, but it was the lobby of the building, encased in a heavy glass box like a museum exhibit. I figured this was a book that was here to remind people of the past and the way things used to be. As I walked over to it, I wondered what would be one book chosen to take this place of honor. Was it a dictionary? A Bible? Maybe the complete works of Shakespeare or some famous poet. "Green Eggs and Ham?" Gunny said with surprise. "What kind of doctor writes about green eggs and ham?" "Dr. Seuss," I answered with a big smile on my face. "It's my favorite book of all time." Patrick joined us and said, "We took a vote. It was pretty much everybody's favorite. Landslide victory. I'm partial to Horton Hears A Who, but this is okay too." The people of Third Earth still had a sense of humor.

This is what the Sabbath should feel like. A pause. Not just a minor pause, but a major pause. Not just lowering the volume, but a muting. As the famous rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, the Sabbath is a sanctuary in time.

Cruel World" Share my body and my mind with you, That's all over now. Did what I had to do, 'Cause it's so far past me now. Share my body and my life with you, That's way over now. There's not more I can do, You're so famous now. Got your bible, got your gun, And you like to party and have fun. And I like my candy and your women, I'm finally happy now that you're gone. Put my little red party dress on, Everybody knows that I'm the best, I'm crazy. Get a little bit of bourbon in ya, Get a little bit suburban and go crazy. Because you're young, you're wild, you're free, You're dancin' circles around me, You're fuckin' crazy. Oh, oh, you're crazy for me. I shared my body and my mind with you, That's all over now. I did what I had to do, I found another anyhow. Share my body and my mind with you, That's all over now. I did what I had to do, I could see you leaving now. I got your bible and your gun, And you love to party and have fun. And I love your women and all of your heroin, And I'm so happy now that you're gone. Put my little red party dress on, Everybody knows that I'm a mess, I'm crazy, yeah-yeah. Get a little bit of bourbon in ya, Go a little bit suburban and go crazy, yeah-yeah. Because you're young, you're wild, you're free, You're dancin' circles around me, You're fuckin' crazy. Oh, oh, you're crazy for me. Got your bible and your gun, You like your women and you like fun. I like my candy and your heroin, And I'm so happy, so happy now you're gone. Put my little red party dress on, Everybody knows that I'm a mess, I'm crazy, yeah-yeah. Get a little bit of bourbon in ya, Get a little bit suburban and go crazy, yeah-yeah. 'Cause you're young, you're wild, you're free, You're dancin' circles around me, You're fuckin' crazy. Oh, oh, you're crazy for me. Oh, oh, you're crazy for me.

There just isn’t enough cock in this world to be caught suckin’ and be called anything but a slut for life. The cynic in me would call it a bad habit, but that’d make me a whore in denial and if there’s one thing I am, it’s an honest bitch. Then again, you don’t get famous for being daddy’s little angel, but you can easily fall into the Infamy Bracket by preaching a made-up Bible quote now and again. They say I’m shallow, but I’ve made a living out off diving off the deep end.

Most sane human beings who have managed to attain and retain fame each uses it to dramatically increase their name’s chances of being remembered until Jesus comes back, since their heart cannot do what they consciously or unconsciously lust for, that is to say, for it to beat until Jesus returns.

biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

I just think of people," she continued, "whether they seem right where they are and fit into the picture. I don't mind if they don't do anything. I don't see why they should; in fact it always astonishes me when anybody does anything." "You don't want to do anything?" "I want to sleep." -Gloria Gilbert "Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief--that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: "'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over--and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. "'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.' "So the men did, and they died. "But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible." -Maury Noble

He developed his revolutionary philosophy, with its grounding not in the Bible or ancient writers but in human reason, and became famous and infamous for it.

And in some sense, God also hates sinners. You might ask, “What happened to ‘God hates the sin and loves the sinner’?” Well, the Bible happened to it. One psalmist said to God, “The arrogant cannot stand in your presence; you hate all who do wrong.”3 Fourteen times in the first fifty psalms we see similar descriptions of God’s hatred toward sinners, his wrath toward liars, and so on. In the chapter in the gospel of John where we find one of the most famous verses concerning God’s love, we also find one of the most neglected verses concerning God’s wrath.4

When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land. They said ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus”—by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story.

In fact, many of the most famous anti-Christian polemicists of the last 200 years—who sought to use science to justify their unbelief—never themselves set foot in a laboratory or conducted a single field observation. That includes the Marquis de Sade (a writer), Percy Bysshe Shelley (a poet), Friedrich Nietzsche (a philologist by training), Algernon Swinburne (a poet), Bertrand Russell (a philosopher), Karl Marx (a philosopher), Robert Ingersoll (a lecturer), George Bernard Shaw (a playwright), Vladimir Lenin (a communist revolutionary), Joseph Stalin (a communist dictator), H. L. Mencken (a newspaper columnist), Jean-Paul Sartre (a philosopher), Benito Mussolini (a fascist dictator), Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Clarence Darrow (a lawyer), Ayn Rand (a novelist), Christopher Hitchens (a journalist), Larry Flynt (a pornographer), George Soros and Warren Buffett (investors), and Penn and Teller (magicians).

Genesis 10:7 is probably the most important verse in the Bible for the purposes of identifying the location of the Garden of Eden. This is because it groups Cush and Havilah together as son and grandson of Ham, the African hot countries. Eden was therefore a place in the region of the historically famous Cush.

This is how readers over the years have come up with the famous “seven last words of the dying Jesus”—by taking what he says at his death in all four Gospels, mixing them together, and imagining that in their combination they now have the full story. This interpretive move does not give the full story. It gives a fifth story, a story that is completely unlike any of the canonical four, a fifth story that in effect rewrites the Gospels, producing a fifth Gospel. This

Eliot, huh?" she says. The thin fabric of her long T-shirt brushes my arm. "Is everyone in your family named for a famous symbolist poet?" No, I'm named for someone who was supposed to be in the Bible but isn't." No? What happened to him?" I glance over at her, the way the corner of her mouth turns up, half-smirk, half-smile. Her hair moves as she walks. He was called to be a disciple, but he had, you know, stuff to do." Stuff, like...polishing his sandals? Making lunch?" We keep walking, over the bridge across the lake, past the swings and the playground equipment, just walking. Exactly. And what about you, Calliope...is everyone in your family named after a...what is it? A keyboard? An organ?" It's a steam-powered piano. It's also the name of the Greek goddess of poetry. You should read stuff other than chemistry; you'd know these things." Her smirky smile again, her sleeve touching my arm. I feel like my skin has been removed, every nerve exposed. I open my mouth, and this comes out: "I think you are more goddess than piano." Stupid, stupid. But she laughs. "You know, that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me today." You don't see too many calliopes," I tell her. I'm Cal, actually. I mean, that's what I prefer." I meant the steam pianos...you don't see too many." She stops and looks at me, full-on, and right away I put it on the list of the best moments in my life. Until you said that, Eliot, I wasn't fully aware of the demise of the steam piano, so thank you. Really." I smirk at her and we both fight not to smile. "Okay, smart-ass," I say.

the Bible is the second most important revelation of God to humanity. The most important revelation of God is Jesus himself.

Jaroslav Pelikan’s famous statement is apt here—“Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.

Balfour wrote the famous Balfour Declaration, dated November 2, 1917, in the name of the country’s cabinet in a letter

The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book. The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them. The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

Once upon a time all the men of mind and genius in the world became of one belief—that is to say, of no belief. But it wearied them to think that within a few years after their death many cults and systems and prognostications would be ascribed to them which they had never meditated nor intended. So they said to one another: "'Let's join together and make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current. We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over—and we'll ascribe to him all sorts of jokes and vanities and rages, in which he'll be supposed to indulge for his own diversion, so that the people will read our book and ponder it, and there'll be no more nonsense in the world. "'Finally, let us take care that the book possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal irony.' "So the men did, and they died. "But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written, and so astounding the quality of imagination with which these men of mind and genius had endowed it. They had neglected to give it a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible.

God shows us what authentic love is in John 3:16, probably the most famous verse in the Bible. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). God so loved the world. He loved the whole world; not just the good part of the world, the part that loved him already, or the part that he knew would love him back. We need to expand our hearts, our comfort zones, and our friend zones. He gave his only Son. He was willing to make real sacrifices to build real relationships. Sometimes we need to put aside projects and schedules for the sake of people. Like Jesus, we need to be interruptible. Whoever. He showed unconditional love and acceptance. Love is risky. We might be rejected. We might be crucified by the people we are trying to help. But ultimately, love will prevail.

There is a famous expression in Zen: 'On the way without leaving home.' Life is a journey and, in that sense, man is always on the way. But the person who has realized the Primal Face of his True Self never leaves home. He is able to be on a journey while having, at the same time, the peace of mind he experiences in his own home.

Terrific, Miss Knight. Simply terrific,' a smiling reporter said. 'They're going to love this story in Peoria. Why, you'll be famous everywhere - from New York to Hollywood, Florida to Kansas.' 'Kansas?' Theta whispered. 'Yeah. Big state in the middle of the country. Fulla corn, Republicans, and Bible salesmen, and not much else?

Margaret [Arlo] was once asked how she felt about her life over the past fifty years. The look in her eyes revealed that she understood the true question: How is it that you continued over fifty years to be as poor as you were at the beginning? ... 'I'm rich-poor,' she said. 'You see, I got my son. I got my Bible. That's all I need. I don't treasure nothin' on earth.

Their famous attempt to make clothing of fig leaves perfectly illustrates the utter inadequacy of every human device ever conceived to try to cover shame. Human religion, philanthropy, education, self-betterment, self-esteem, and all other attempts at human goodness ultimately fail to provide adequate camouflage for the disgrace and shame of our fallen state. All the man-made remedies combined are no more effective for removing the dishonor of our sin than our first parents' attempts to conceal their nakedness with fig leaves. That's because masking over shame doesn't really deal with the problem of guilt before God. Worst of all, a full atonement for guilt is far outside the possibility of fallen men and women to provide for themselves.

Henry de Bracton’s famous 13th century dictum, “Not under man, but under God and law,” was understood by the Americans to mean that any government official, including the king, had to act on the basis of the law and could not change the structure of the government or the laws without the consent of those governed. Furthermore, there were fixed standards of law established in God’s decrees—found in the Bible—and in His created order—found in nature—that were to be obeyed by everyone, at all times.

When the angels of the Bible spoke to human beings, did they speak in words? I don’t think so. I think the angels said nothing, but they were heard in the purest silence of the human spirit, and were understood beyond words. On a more human scale there are many things beyond. A mother watches her child leave home. Her heart is still. Her eyes are full of tears and prayer. That is beyond. An old man with wrinkled hands is carrying his grandchild. With startled eyes the baby regards his grandfather. The old man, with the knowledge of Time’s sadness in his heart, and with love in his eyes, looks down at the child. The meeting of their eyes. That is beyond. A famous writer, feeling his life coming to an end, writes these words: ‘My soul looks back and wonders – just how I got I got over.’ A young woman, standing on a shore, looks out into an immense azure sea rimmed with the silver line of the horizon. She looks out into the obscure heart of destiny, and is overwhelmed by a feeling both dark and oddly joyful. She may be thinking something like this: ‘My soul looks forward and wonders- just how am I to get across.’ That is beyond.

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

The flat, overall illumination of Protestant ideology was all very well but for these sophisticates, pure, simple plainness was not enough. Francis Bacon, corrupt, brilliant and unlikeable, builder of his own great pair of houses, now disappeared, not far away at St Albans, famous for the pale-faced catamites he kept to warm his bed, the inventor of the English essay, later to be Lord Chancellor, and, later still, accused of corruption, to be thrown to parliament as a sop to their demands, defined in his essay ‘On Truth’ the subtle and shifting Jacobean relationship to light and beauty, to plainness and richness, to clarity and sparkle. ‘This same Truth’, he wrote,

There were days, weeks, and months when I hated politics. And there were moments when the beauty of this country and its people so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t speak. Then it was over. Even if you see it coming, even as your final weeks are filled with emotional good-byes, the day itself is still a blur. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled in the span of a few hours. Just like that, there are new heads on new pillows—new temperaments, new dreams. And when it ends, when you walk out the door that last time from the world’s most famous address, you’re left in many ways to find yourself again. So let me start here, with a small thing that happened not long ago. I was at home in the redbrick house that my family recently moved into. Our new house sits about two miles from our old house, on a quiet neighborhood street. We’re still settling in. In the family room, our furniture is arranged the same way it was in the White House. We’ve got mementos around the house that remind us it was all real—photos of our family time at Camp David, handmade pots given to me by Native American students, a book signed by Nelson Mandela. What was strange about this night was that everyone was gone. Barack was traveling. Sasha was out with friends. Malia’s been living and working in New York, finishing out her gap year before college. It was just me, our two dogs, and a silent, empty house like I haven’t known in eight years.

On January 30, 1750, Mayhew stood in the pulpit of Boston’s Old West Church and preached on the occasion of the 101st anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. His message from Romans 13, titled “A Discourse Concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the High Powers,” became “the most famous sermon preached in pre-Revolutionary America.”2 When published, Mayhew’s sermon spread like electricity through the Colonies. John Adams, fourteen at the time, read it over and over “till the Substance of it, was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory.”3 Adams later called Mayhew’s sermon “the catechism” for the American Revolution.4 Others have called it “the first volley of the American Revolution, setting forth the intellectual and scriptural justification for rebellion against the crown.”5 In

While studying my bible, I noticed that all the miracle Jesus did was never magical, the people that received their healing call it the blind man, the woman with the issue of blood, lazarus, the man they threw through the ceiling to him etc, had one thing in common. I didn't call it faith but I call it action. ...they made a move and was ready to make a shift and a change. Lessons to learn from here; faith without work better put without action is dead. Secondly, miracle will never find you in your sitting room, you need to make a move in order to find it. Third, God can only start the work in your life only with what you have left not what you do not have. Fourth, do your own part and then allow God to do the one you cannot do. Fifth, always be ready for a change. Sixth, when you have done everything and nothing seems to work....Call on JESUS...I am a living withness, He always starts when we are tired.

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

Honest to God, I hadn’t meant to start a bar fight. “So. You’re the famous Jordan Amador.” The demon sitting in front of me looked like someone filled a pig bladder with rotten cottage cheese. He overflowed the bar stool with his gelatinous stomach, just barely contained by a white dress shirt and an oversized leather jacket. Acid-washed jeans clung to his stumpy legs and his boots were at least twice the size of mine. His beady black eyes started at my ankles and dragged upward, past my dark jeans, across my black turtleneck sweater, and over the grey duster around me that was two sizes too big. He finally met my gaze and snorted before continuing. “I was expecting something different. Certainly not a black girl. What’s with the name, girlie?” I shrugged. “My mother was a religious woman.” “Clearly,” the demon said, tucking a fat cigar in one corner of his mouth. He stood up and walked over to the pool table beside him where he and five of his lackeys had gathered. Each of them was over six feet tall and were all muscle where he was all fat. “I could start to examine the literary significance of your name, or I could ask what the hell you’re doing in my bar,” he said after knocking one of the balls into the left corner pocket. “Just here to ask a question, that’s all. I don’t want trouble.” Again, he snorted, but this time smoke shot from his nostrils, which made him look like an albino dragon. “My ass you don’t. This place is for fallen angels only, sweetheart. And we know your reputation.” I held up my hands in supplication. “Honest Abe. Just one question and I’m out of your hair forever.” My gaze lifted to the bald spot at the top of his head surrounded by peroxide blonde locks. “What’s left of it, anyway.” He glared at me. I smiled, batting my eyelashes. He tapped his fingers against the pool cue and then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine. What’s your question?” “Know anybody by the name of Matthias Gruber?” He didn’t even blink. “No.” “Ah. I see. Sorry to have wasted your time.” I turned around, walking back through the bar. I kept a quick, confident stride as I went, ignoring the whispers of the fallen angels in my wake. A couple called out to me, asking if I’d let them have a taste, but I didn’t spare them a glance. Instead, I headed to the ladies’ room. Thankfully, it was empty, so I whipped out my phone and dialed the first number in my Recent Call list. “Hey. He’s here. Yeah, I’m sure it’s him. They’re lousy liars when they’re drunk. Uh-huh. Okay, see you in five.” I hung up and let out a slow breath. Only a couple things left to do. I gathered my shoulder-length black hair into a high ponytail. I looped the loose curls around into a messy bun and made sure they wouldn’t tumble free if I shook my head too hard. I took the leather gloves in the pocket of my duster out and pulled them on. Then, I walked out of the bathroom and back to the front entrance. The coat-check girl gave me a second unfriendly look as I returned with my ticket stub to retrieve my things—three vials of holy water, a black rosary with the beads made of onyx and the cross made of wood, a Smith & Wesson .9mm Glock complete with a full magazine of blessed bullets and a silencer, and a worn out page of the Bible. I held out my hands for the items and she dropped them on the counter with an unapologetic, “Oops.” “Thanks,” I said with a roll of my eyes. I put the Glock back in the hip holster at my side and tucked the rest of the items in the pockets of my duster. The brunette demon crossed her arms under her hilariously oversized fake breasts and sent me a vicious sneer. “The door is that way, Seer. Don’t let it hit you on the way out.” I smiled back. “God bless you.” She let out an ugly hiss between her pearly white teeth. I blew her a kiss and walked out the door. The parking lot was packed outside now that it was half-past midnight. Demons thrived in darkness, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

In a sense the rise of Anabaptism was no surprise. Most revolutionary movements produce a wing of radicals who feel called of God to reform the reformation. And that is what Anabaptism was, a voice calling the moderate reformers to strike even more deeply at the foundations of the old order. Like most counterculture movements, the Anabaptists lacked cohesiveness. No single body of doctrine and no unifying organization prevailed among them. Even the name Anabaptist was pinned on them by their enemies. It meant rebaptizer and was intended to associate the radicals with heretics in the early church and subject them to severe persecution. The move succeeded famously. Actually, the Anabaptists rejected all thoughts of rebaptism because they never considered the ceremonial sprinkling they received in infancy as valid baptism. They much preferred Baptists as a designation. To most of them, however, the fundamental issue was not baptism. It was the nature of the church and its relation to civil governments. They had come to their convictions like most other Protestants: through Scripture. Luther had taught that common people have a right to search the Bible for themselves. It had been his guide to salvation; why not theirs? As a result, little groups of Anabaptist believers gathered about their Bibles. They discovered a different world in the pages of the New Testament. They found no state-church alliance, no Christendom. Instead they discovered that the apostolic churches were companies of committed believers, communities of men and women who had freely and personally chosen to follow Jesus. And for the sixteenth century, that was a revolutionary idea. In spite of Luther’s stress on personal religion, Lutheran churches were established churches. They retained an ordained clergy who considered the whole population of a given territory members of their church. The churches looked to the state for salary and support. Official Protestantism seemed to differ little from official Catholicism. Anabaptists wanted to change all that. Their goal was the “restitution” of apostolic Christianity, a return to churches of true believers. In the early church, they said, men and women who had experienced personal spiritual regeneration were the only fit subjects for baptism. The apostolic churches knew nothing of the practice of baptizing infants. That tradition was simply a convenient device for perpetuating Christendom: nominal but spiritually impotent Christian society. The true church, the radicals insisted, is always a community of saints, dedicated disciples in a wicked world. Like the missionary monks of the Middle Ages, the Anabaptists wanted to shape society by their example of radical discipleship—if necessary, even by death. They steadfastly refused to be a part of worldly power including bearing arms, holding political office, and taking oaths. In the sixteenth century this independence from social and civic society was seen as inflammatory, revolutionary, or even treasonous.

God famously doesn't afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan. Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the soft radiant beauty of many of its passages, the Bible still has a mechanical quality, a refusal to brook complexity that feels brutal and violent. There has been a change, however. When I look at Revelation now, it still seems frightening and impenetrable, and it still suggests an inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us, in which our earthly concerns matter very little. However, it not longer reads to me like a chronicle of arbitrarily inflicted cruelty. It reads like a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on earth. When I read And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pain and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds, I think of myself and others I've known or know who blaspheme life itself by failing to have the courage to be honest and kind—and how then we rage around and lash out because we hurt. When I read the word fornication, I don't read it as a description of sex outside legal marriage: I read it as sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one's self or one's partner, let alone any sense of honor or even real playfulness. I still don't know what to make of much of it, but I'm inclined to read it as a writer's primitive attempt to give form to his moral urgency, to create a structure that could contain and give ballast to the most desperate human confusion.

Another potential challenge to my thesis is that I myself would be hypocritical to continue in biblical studies. However, while I concede that this would be true if I were pursuing biblical studies for the sake of keeping the field alive, I have instead used my work in biblical studies to persuade people to abandon reliance on this book. I see my goal as no different from physicians, whose goal of ending human illness would lead to their eventual unemployment. The same holds true for me. I would be hypocritical only if I sought to maintain the relevance of my profession despite my belief that the profession is irrelevant. If I work to inform people of the irrelevance of the Bible for modern life, then I am fully consistent with my beliefs. From a different angle, our work is part of the proliferation of books preoccupied with the finality of different aspects of the human experience. Perhaps the most famous recent example is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (2002), in which he argued that liberal democracy constitutes the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution," so that we should expect no new historical developments in world history. Fukuyama's thesis, of course, has been misunderstood to mean that historical events would end. However, the truth is that he has a more Hegelian view of history, in which history ends when a sort of stasis in the development of new ideas is reached. According to Fukuyama, liberal democracy cannot be superseded and will triumph over any other competing political idea; people will see its advantages and will universally adopt it. And so, in that sense, history will end.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels. He started inventing new words. This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn’t help themselves. They were always inventing new words. Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok. To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing. A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink. They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking. People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking. With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing. In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok. Baby had always been popular with people on the Internet, which was a wonderful place to deny climate change, willfully misinterpret the Bible, and denounce Darwin’s theory of evolution. Now that Baby had coined nonsense neologisms, he had become more than popular. He had become quotable.

Olo-keZ G-- a tc There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven. -ECCLESIASTES 3:1 What would we do without our day planners? I have a large one for my desk and a carry-all that goes with me. I don't know how a person functions without some type of organizer. I just love it; it truly has become my daily-calendar bible. I take it with me everywhere. My whole life is in that book. Each evening I peek in to see what tomorrow has to bring. I just love to see a busy calendar; it makes me feel so alive. I've got this to do and that to do. Then I come upon a day that has all white space. Not one thing to do. What, oh what, will I do to fill the space and time? That's the way I used to think and plan. All my spaces had appointments written down, and many times they even overlapped. I now plan for white spaces. I even plan ahead weeks or months and black out "saved for me or my family" days. I have begun to realize that there are precious times for myself and my loved ones. Bob and I really try to protect these saved spaces just for us. We may not go anywhere or do anything out of the ordinary, but it's our special time. We can do anything we want: sleep in, stay out late, go to lunch, read a book, go to a movie, or take a nap. I really look forward with great anticipation to when these white spaces appear on my calendar. I've been so impressed when I've read biographies of famous people. Many of them are controllers of their own time. They don't let outsiders dictate their schedules. Sure, there are times when things have to be done on special days, but generally that isn't the case. When we begin to control our calendars, we will find that our lives are more enjoyable and that the tensions of life are more manageable. Make those white spaces your friend, not your enemy.

Never, perhaps, since Paul wrote has there been more need to labor this point than there is today. Modern muddle-headedness and confusion as to the meaning of faith in God are almost beyond description. People say they believe in God, but they have no idea who it is that they believe in, or what difference believing in him may make. Christians who want to help their floundering fellows into what a famous old tract used to call “safety, certainty and enjoyment” are constantly bewildered as to where to begin: the fantastic hodgepodge of fancies about God quite takes their breath away. How on earth have people got into such a muddle? What lies at the root of their confusion? And where is the starting point for setting them straight? To these questions there are several complementary sets of answers. One is that people have gotten into the practice of following private religious hunches rather than learning of God from his own Word, we have to try to help them unlearn the pride and, in some cases, the misconceptions about Scripture which gave rise to this attitude and to base their convictions henceforth not on what they feel but on what the Bible says. A second answer is that modern people think of all religions as equal and equivalent-they draw their ideas about God from pagan as well as Christian sources; we have to try to show people the uniqueness and finality of the Lord Jesus Christ, God’s last word to man. A third answer is that people have ceased to recognize the reality of their own sinfulness, which imparts a degree of perversity and enmity against God to all that they think and do; it is our task to try to introduce people to this fact about themselves and so make them self-distrustful and open to correction by the word of Christ. A fourth answer, no less basic than the three already given, is that people today are in the habit of disassociating the thought of God’s goodness from that of his severity; we must seek to wean them from this habit, since nothing but misbelief is possible as long as it persists.

The key question for any nation is always, “Which system of morals should be followed?” Numerous American leaders, including Thomas Jefferson, thoroughly investigated the answer to this query. For years, Jefferson studied the moral teachings of dozens of history’s most famous moral philosophers, including Ocellus, Timæus, Pythagoras, Aristides, Cato, Socrates, Plato, Epicurus, Cicero, Xenophon, Seneca, Epictetus, Antoninus, and many others.27 After reading and critiquing the writings of each, Jefferson repeatedly praised the preeminence of Jesus’ moral teachings over all others,28 pointing out that Jesus alone “pushed His scrutinies into the heart of man, erected His tribunal in the region of his thoughts, and purified the waters at the fountain head.”29 Jefferson contemplated publishing a personal work to document his findings, explaining how he would cover this subject in such a piece: I should first take a general view of the moral doctrines of the most remarkable of the ancient philosophers of whose ethics we have sufficient information to make an estimate—say Pythagoras, Epicurus, Epictetus, Socrates, Cicero, Seneca, Antoninus. I should do justice to the branches of morality they have treated well, but point out the importance of those in which they are deficient….I should proceed to a view of the life, character, and doctrines of Jesus….[H]is system of morality was the most benevolent and sublime probably that has been ever taught, and consequently more perfect than those of any of the ancient philosophers.30 Jefferson eventually did compile a work on the “benevolent and sublime” teachings of Jesus for his personal use. He titled it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, and in it he included 81 moral teachings of Jesus.31 In 1895, Congress purchased Jefferson’s original manuscript from his great-granddaughter,32 and in 1902, the US Congress published it for use by the nation’s federal senators and representatives.33 Nine thousand copies were printed at government expense, and for the next 50 years, every senator and representative received a copy of Jefferson’s Life and Morals of Jesus at his or her swearing in.34 This book is often called “The Jefferson Bible,” which is a substantial misrepresentation of this work on the wonderful moral teachings of Jesus. After all, Jefferson never called it a Bible; he simply created a readily-usable collection of the moral teachings of Jesus.*

The same lesson can be learned from one of the most widely read books in history: the Bible. What is the Bible “about”? Different people will of course answer that question differently. But we could all agree the Bible contains perhaps the most influential set of rules in human history: the Ten Commandments. They became the foundation of not only the Judeo-Christian tradition but of many societies at large. So surely most of us can recite the Ten Commandments front to back, back to front, and every way in between, right? All right then, go ahead and name the Ten Commandments. We’ll give you a minute to jog your memory . . . . . . . . . . . . Okay, here they are:        1. I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage.        2. You shall have no other gods before Me.        3. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.        4. Remember the Sabbath day, to make it holy.        5. Honor your father and your mother.        6. You shall not murder.        7. You shall not commit adultery.        8. You shall not steal.        9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.       10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor your neighbor’s wife . . . nor any thing that is your neighbor’s. How did you do? Probably not so well. But don’t worry—most people don’t. A recent survey found that only 14 percent of U.S. adults could recall all Ten Commandments; only 71 percent could name even one commandment. (The three best-remembered commandments were numbers 6, 8, and 10—murder, stealing, and coveting—while number 2, forbidding false gods, was in last place.) Maybe, you’re thinking, this says less about biblical rules than how bad our memories are. But consider this: in the same survey, 25 percent of the respondents could name the seven principal ingredients of a Big Mac, while 35 percent could name all six kids from The Brady Bunch. If we have such a hard time recalling the most famous set of rules from perhaps the most famous book in history, what do we remember from the Bible? The stories. We remember that Eve fed Adam a forbidden apple and that one of their sons, Cain, murdered the other, Abel. We remember that Moses parted the Red Sea in order to lead the Israelites out of slavery. We remember that Abraham was instructed to sacrifice his own son on a mountain—and we even remember that King Solomon settled a maternity dispute by threatening to slice a baby in half. These are the stories we tell again and again and again, even those of us who aren’t remotely “religious.” Why? Because they stick with us; they move us; they persuade us to consider the constancy and frailties of the human experience in a way that mere rules cannot.

(3) Theology of Exodus: A Covenant People “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God” (Exod 6:7). When God first demanded that the Egyptian Pharaoh let Israel leave Egypt, he referred to Israel as “my … people.” Again and again he said those famous words to Pharaoh, Let my people go.56 Pharaoh may not have known who Yahweh was,57 but Yahweh certainly knew Israel. He knew them not just as a nation needing rescue but as his own people needing to be closely bound to him by the beneficent covenant he had in store for them once they reached the place he was taking them to himself, out of harm's way, and into his sacred space.58 To be in the image of God is to have a job assignment. God's “image”59 is supposed to represent him on earth and accomplish his purposes here. Reasoning from a degenerate form of this truth, pagan religions thought that an image (idol) in the form of something they fashioned would convey to its worshipers the presence of a god or goddess. But the real purpose of the heavenly decision described in 1:26 was not to have a humanlike statue as a representative of God on earth but to have humans do his work here, as the Lord's Prayer asks (“your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” Matt 6:10). Although the fall of humanity as described in Genesis 3 corrupted the ability of humans to function properly in the image of God, the divine plan of redemption was hardly thwarted. It took the form of the calling of Abraham and the promises to him of a special people. In both Exod 6:6–8 and 19:4–6 God reiterates his plan to develop a people that will be his very own, a special people that, in distinction from all other peoples of the earth, will belong to him and accomplish his purposes, being as Exod 19:6 says “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Since the essence of holiness is belonging to God, by belonging to God this people became holy, reflecting the character of their Lord as well as being obedient to his purposes. No other nation in the ancient world ever claimed Yahweh as its God, and Yahweh never claimed any other nation as his people. This is not to say that he did not love and care for other nations60 but only to say that he chose Israel as the focus of his plan of redemption for the world. In the New Testament, Israel becomes all who will place faith in Jesus Christ—not an ethnic or political entity at all but now a spiritual entity, a family of God. Thus the New Testament speaks of the true Israel as defined by conversion to Christ in rebirth and not by physical birth at all. But in the Old Covenant, the true Israel was the people group that, from the various ethnic groups that gathered at Sinai, agreed to accept God's covenant and therefore to benefit from this abiding presence among them (see comments on Exod 33:12–24:28). Exodus is the place in the Bible where God's full covenant with a nation—as opposed to a person or small group—emerges, and the language of Exod 6:7, “I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God,” is language predicting that covenant establishment.61

A few years ago, a couple of young men from my church came to our home for dinner. During the course of the dinner, the conversation turned from religion to various world mythologies and we began to play the game of ‘Name That Character.” To play this game, you pick a category such as famous actors, superheroes or historical characters. In turn, each person describes events in a famous character’s life while everyone else tries to guess who the character is. Strategically you try to describe the deeds of a character in such a way that it might fit any number of characters in that category. After three guesses, if no one knows who your character is, then you win. Choosing the category of Bible Characters, we played a couple of fairly easy rounds with the typical figures, then it was my turn. Now, knowing these well meaning young men had very little religious experience or understanding outside of their own religion, I posed a trick question. I said, “Now my character may seem obvious, but please wait until the end of my description to answer.” I took a long breath for dramatic effect, and began, “My character was the son of the King of Heaven and a mortal woman.” Immediately both young men smiled knowingly, but I raised a finger asking them to wait to give their responses. I continued, “While he was just a baby, a jealous rival attempted to kill him and he was forced into hiding for several years. As he grew older, he developed amazing powers. Among these were the ability to turn water into wine and to control the mental health of other people. He became a great leader and inspired an entire religious movement. Eventually he ascended into heaven and sat with his father as a ruler in heaven.” Certain they knew who I was describing, my two guests were eager to give the winning answer. However, I held them off and continued, “Now I know adding these last parts will seem like overkill, but I simply cannot describe this character without mentioning them. This person’s birthday is celebrated on December 25th and he is worshipped in a spring festival. He defied death, journeyed to the underworld to raise his loved ones from the dead and was resurrected. He was granted immortality by his Father, the king of the gods, and was worshipped as a savior god by entire cultures.” The two young men were practically climbing out of their seats, their faces beaming with the kind of smile only supreme confidence can produce. Deciding to end the charade I said, “I think we all know the answer, but to make it fair, on the count of three just yell out the answer. One. Two. Three.” “Jesus Christ” they both exclaimed in unison – was that your answer as well? Both young men sat back completely satisfied with their answer, confident it was the right one…, but I remained silent. Five seconds ticked away without a response, then ten. The confidence of my two young friends clearly began to drain away. It was about this time that my wife began to shake her head and smile to herself. Finally, one of them asked, “It is Jesus Christ, right? It has to be!” Shaking my head, I said, “Actually, I was describing the Greek god Dionysus.

A man may not be a vocational theologian, but in his home he must the resident theologian. The apostle Paul, when he is urging women to keep silent in church, tells them that "if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home" (1 Corinthians 14:35). The tragedy is that many modern women have to wonder why the Bible says they should have to ask their husbands. "He doesn't know." But a husband must be prepared to answer his wife's doctrinal questions, and if he cannot, then he must be prepared to study so that he can remedy the deficiency. This famous passage is not such a restriction for wives as it is a requirement for husbands. If he doesn't know, he must find out.

In The Archangel Raphael Leaving Tobias' Family, Rembrandt leaves dirt on the shadowed soles of Raphael's feet as he flies off, illuminated in glory. Passing by the painting, one sees the dramatic action, the melodramatic emotions, and the re-created narrative events of the Bible. Slowed down a bit, the viewer sees light across a large muscular calf, a strong and sharply shaped ankle, and then dirty feet. The angel who tells us he only pretended to eat - this to explain away all traces of his apparent earthliness as a fallen creaturely being - is here on the canvas with dirty feet, carrying soil, the created, to the creator. Van Gogh had rightly said there are mysteries in these paintings. They are mysteries of device and design, not of messianic significance. They require a docent and not a priest, a creative critic to guide the view of specific images, not a guardian of mysteries and master of their enigmatic authority. Dirty feet on the soles of an archangel famous for his annunciations give the viewer a point of view on the inescapably human nature of the narrated God. Raphael may no eat. He may believe he creates an illusion to satisfy the religious desire for mythological consistency, but even archangels deceive themselves as well as others. Humans sometimes do the same in inventing the transcendence they need or think they want - creating a regime from which the priestly classes rule, even theorizing the alienation of the divine. Deceit is an essential device of cultural adaptation. It constructs needed beliefs that at high and low levels of thought or action complement their existence with modes of self-defense, which protect them from not only needed analysis but also the importance of failure.

The famous rocks of David and Goliath have been transformed into rocket combats between Arabs and Jews.

When we think of broken people, we think of addicts or the homeless. We think of circumstances that are horrible. But we don’t often think of CEO’s or celebrities. We forget that behind the fame and success and money, what this book,” he lifted his Bible, “says about human nature is true. That brokenness is a symptom of the human nature. And the rich and famous among us are just as broken as the heroin addicts. Although Paul was facing awful circumstances—he was imprisoned, likely sick or injured. But Paul wasn’t broken. In fact, he said ‘In all things, I have learned to be content.’ He said, ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ because he found his strength and identity in Christ. That is a peace that is beyond understanding and beyond the things of this fallen world.

In his famous sermon, "De Sun Do Move, de Earth Am Squared," Jasper said, "I take my stand by de Bible and rest my case on what it says. I take what de Lord says bout my sins, bout my Saviour, bout life, bout death, bout de world to come and I take what de Lord say bout de sun and moon and I cares little what de haters of my God chooses to say.

He wrote English tracts, of which the most famous was The Wicket, which were passed from hand to hand. Finally, with his students he took the tremendous step of having the Bible translated into English. “Cristen men and wymmen, olde and yonge, shulden studie fast in the Newe Testament, for it is of ful autorite, and opyn to undirstonding of simple men, as to the poyntis that be moost nedeful to salvacioun. …Each place of holy writ, both opyn and derk, techith mekenes and charite; and therfore he that kepith mekenes and charite hath the trewe undirstondyng and perfectioun of al holi writ. …Therefore no simple man of wit be aferd unmesurabli to studie in the text of holy writ… and no clerk be proude of the verrey undirstondyng of holy writ, for why undirstonding of hooly writ with outen charite that kepith Goddis [be]heestis, makith a man depper dampned… and pride and covetise of clerkis is cause of her blindnees and eresie, and priveth them fro verrey undirstondyng of holy writ.

The perpetual frustration this causes is captured in the famous line “l’enfer, c’est les autres” (“hell is other people”).

Fanatics feel that only the godless and the immoral could possibly understand the Bible as a collection of diverse literary myths, sexy stories, primitive laws, and biased histories, unconnected in their presentation, and unworthy of belief in their totality. Such true believers are quite satisfied with the famous refutation of reason of the early Christian church: “I believe it because it is absurd.

Burials from the Middle Paleolithic period were in pits, with the body in a contracted position. From the Natufian culture come contracted burials but also burials involving just the skull. In the Neolithic period, burials were sometimes made beneath the floors of houses. From this period come the famous plastered skulls from Jericho (see below on ‘Human, animal, and plant remains’). A

Inside ‘Hezekiah’s Tunnel’ in Jerusalem was the famous ‘Siloam Inscription’ describing the tunnel’s construction (see ‘Jerusalem in the 1st Millennium BCE’). Approximately contemporary was the inscription carved into the lintel of a rock-cut tomb at Silwan (Siloam), overlooking the Kidron valley and Jerusalem. The damaged inscription suggested that the tomb was that of someone whose name ended-yahu (usually anglicized as-iah in personal names) and who was (literally) ‘over the house’, that is, a steward. In Isaiah 22: 15–16, this precise description (NRSV ‘master of the household’) is used of the royal steward Shebna, who is criticized for ‘cutting a tomb on the height’.

Question upon question piling up, especially for readers of Paolo Rumor’s book. The author places the beginning of our traceable history, or at least our presumable history, in a kind of Year Zero. This Secret History would have been controlled, in an eminently discreet fashion, by this phantom “entity”, which, after having created dynastic empires and great civilizations, would also be behind the creation of none other than current modernity, including the European Union.

The famous ritual of Jesus washing the feet of his male disciples (John 13 : 1–11). After taking his clothes off (yes, he strips) and tying a towel around his waist, Jesus does something that only slaves and women did in his culture, something that “real men” never did: he washes other peoples’ feet. More provocatively still, it is this unmanly or womanly act, he teaches, that signals both his own divinity and the way he wants his own disciples to live. As Jennings has it, “Jesus’s ‘divine’ identity thus is expressed in his disregard for the most intimately enforced institutions of worldly society: gender role expectations.” Not everyone, of course, is pleased with such a queer act: “Jesus stripping naked and washing the feet of his friends,” Jennings reminds us, is “something that Peter at least regards as quite unseemly.” Dale Martin makes a very similar point: although “Jesus allows a woman to wash his feet (and we biblical scholars— who know our Hebrew—recognize the hint [foot penis]), when it is his turn, he takes his clothes off, wraps a towel around his waist, and washes the feet of his male disciples, again taking time out for a special seduction of Peter.” Modern readers, then, may be blind to the gendered and sexual meanings of such acts, but the original participants certainly were not, nor are our contemporary gnostic scholars.

The Bible, the Holy Book inspired by God, is a life-changing force that transforms sinners into saints. As the living and active Word of God, it's sharper than any double-edged sword, revealing God's truth to the world. With its power to save our souls from eternal fire, teach us to live a holy life, and unlock hardened hearts, it's the greatest Book on earth. It comforts the lonely, gives hope to the hopeless, and lifts us up in despair. As Jesus Christ is the living Word of God, the Bible is our guide, wisdom, and strength, providing peace, security, deliverance, healing, and protection from all evil. Its words stand forever, even as heaven and earth pass away, and its power is revealed in everything in the world.

Also, the royal officials have come to congratulate our lord King David, saying, ‘May your God make Solomon’s name more famous than yours and his throne greater than yours!’ And the king bowed in worship on his bed and said, ‘Praise be to the LORD, the God of Israel, who has allowed my eyes to see a successor on my throne today.

This petition very wisely reminds us of how prayer works. If people prayed this prayer, and then sat back and waited for bread to fall into their hands, they would certainly starve. It reminds us that prayer and work go hand in hand and that when we pray we must go on to work to make our prayers come true. It is true that the living seed comes from God, but it is equally true that it is our task to grow and to cultivate that seed. Dick Sheppard, the famous pacifist and preacher, used to love a certain story. There was a man who had an allotment; he had with great toil reclaimed a piece of ground, clearing away the stones, eradicating the rank growth of weeds, enriching and feeding the ground, until it produced the loveliest flowers and vegetables. One evening he was showing a pious friend around his allotment. The pious friend said: ‘It’s wonderful what God can do with a bit of ground like this, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes,’ said the man who had put in such toil, ‘but you should have seen this bit of ground when God had it to himself!’ God’s bounty and human toil must combine. Prayer, like faith, without works is dead. When we pray this petition, we are recognizing two basic truths – that without God we can do nothing, and that without our effort and co-operation God can do nothing for us.

King James is more famous today for his version of the Bible than for his belief in diabolical practices. But in 1597, more than a decade before the King James Bible was published, he wrote a treatise on demons and sorcery called Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue. The king was obsessed with the occult, and with witches in particular, having flushed out a coven of at least 70 in 1590, when he was still known as King James VI of Scotland. The witches were tortured using devices like the “breast ripper”—which is exactly as horrific as it sounds—until they confessed. Eventually, some 4,000 people were burned at the stake in Scotland’s witch trials. In Daemonologie, the king wrote of his belief in cruentation as a way to mete out justice: In a secret murther, if the deade carcase be at any time thereafter handled by the murtherer, it will gush out of bloud, as if the bloud were crying out to the heaven for revenge of the murtherer, God having appoynted that secret super-naturall signe for tryall of that secret unnatural crime.*

Discoverer of Göbekli Tepe and its chief excavator, Dr Klaus Schmidt, famously warned against what he called ‘Holy Land Syndrome,’ which is the propensity for archaeologists to head out into the field with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other. Holy Land Syndrome precludes the finding of something you didn’t already expect to find.

Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry—angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The

The Bible reads like a collection of books about people caught up in exodus and exile. It is a book that shows the destruction of imperialism and war. It shows how innocents suffer. The climax of the book is the suffering innocent saviour crucified on a tree. But, God is not done there, it is also a story of resurrection, redemption, and hope. It is the story of people with good news to share by words and action. It is counter-culture and more relevant now than some may realise. In an age of wars and rumours of war, an age of refugees in exile and mass exodus, it speaks of the need for love and compassion. The early followers of Jesus were famous for love and not hate. So while the extremists, the religiously ignorant, the politically cold, the divisive nationalists and the greedy arms dealers fuel the world's problems, and beat the war drums, let us the people of new birth be lights in the darkness and voices in the wilderness. Let us live and sing the song of love, for truly His banner over us is love. It is to that beat we march and in His name, not the gods of hate and war, but the God of love, the Prince of Shalom (peace). Soli Deo Gloria. Amen

The Testament of Solomon, a work from the third century AD, further illustrates the widespread belief in apotropaic magic. This is a pseudepigraphical work (one that falsely claims to have been written by a famous person of the Old Testament) attributed to Solomon.

is now evident that many events of biblical history did not take place in either the particular era or the manner described. Some of the most famous events in the Bible clearly never happened at all.

Is your wife the devil? That is the reason the bible says we should cast out devil. Is your husband the devil? The bible still repeat cast out the devil. How can you reach your world if you can't reach your home? How do you expect to win the whole world if you can't win in your house.

You can never experience peace until you tell the devil that you are a child of God. CNN or BBC won't do that for you. My bible says if I should say to this mountain, let thou be removed. It didn't say if I should fall, cry or fail but if I should say.......

When next the devil attack you apply your break; resist the devil and he will flew from you. The bible didn't say you should run from the devil but resist him.

You can prophecy without going to the bible school. If you acknowledge Jesus, you receive the gift of prophecy and you can prophecy. The holy spirit is always there for you.

As Solzhenitsyn famously said, speaking out of his experience in the brutal and soul-crushing Russian gulag, If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?53

The Book of Ecclesiastes in the Holy Bible was written more than two thousand years ago, just before I was born. Chapter III contains the famous verses about there being a time, a season, and a purpose for everything. Who needs modern self-help books and expensive therapy when this astute advice explains it all?

God had told Abram, “Leave your own country behind you, and your own people, and go to the land I will guide you to. 2 If you do, I will cause you to become the father of a great nation; I will bless you and make your name famous, and you will be a blessing to many others.[*] 3 I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you; and the entire world will be blessed because of you.”[*]

The Bible speaks of our relationship with God as knowing and being known (Gal 4:9; 1 Cor 13:12). The goal is not just the sharing of ideas but also of ourselves. Communication can lead to two-way personal revelation that produces what can only be called a dynamic experience. J. I. Packer, in his famous work Knowing God, writes: Knowing God is a matter of personal dealing. . . . Knowing God is more than knowing about him; it is a matter of dealing with him as he opens up to you, and being dealt with by him. . . . Friends . . . open their hearts to each other by what they say and do. . . . We must not lose sight of the fact that knowing God is an emotional relationship, as well as an intellectual and volitional one, and could not indeed be a deep relationship between persons if it

One of the earliest to articulate a more doctrinal understanding of the Scripture was the slave and father of African-American literature, Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?). In 1760, Hammon became the first African-American to publish a work of literature. He expressed his belief in the Bible and exhorted his audience to read it in his famous Address to the Negroes in the State of New York: [T]he Bible is the word of God and tells you what you must do to please God; it tells you how you may escape misery and be happy forever. If you see most people neglect the Bible, and many that can read never look into it, let it not harden you and make you think lightly of it and that it is a book of no worth. All those who are really good love the Bible and meditate on it day and night. In the Bible, God has told us everything it is necessary we should know in order to be happy here and hereafter. The Bible is the mind and will of God to men.5

Pontius Pilate in Jesus’s death, instead placing blame on the Jews. The fairness of Pilate and his Roman administration that is displayed in the Christian Bible is not supported by the nonbiblical historical accounts. As Elaine Pagels has noted in The Origin of Satan: “Even Josephus, despite his Roman sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds. The Jewish Greek historian Philo describes Pilate as a man of ‘ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,’ famous for, among other things, ordering ‘frequent executions without trial.

problems with some of the reviews/ratings in Amazon's App Store. What these problems mean for you is that an app's ratings/reviews can likely only be partially trusted (and if they can only be partially trusted, what's the point: How do you know when you can (and when you can't) trust the ratings/reviews? (John Wanamaker's famous adage about advertising relates here: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.")) I love Amazon, I love the KF, and I love the Amazon App Store, but these are all issues that should probably be addressed. In the meantime, the best solution I can think of is to

Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its evil desires.’ Romans 6:12 Self-control is one of the great keys to success in life. And since God’s Word has a lot to say about it, if you ask Him He will help you to cultivate it. What you struggled with when you were young will be different from the things you struggle with when you’re older, but you’ll face temptation in one form or another as long as you live. Self-control is one of the nine fruits of the Spirit listed in the Bible (see Galatians 5:22-23). It calls for bringing every aspect of your life under the mastery of the Holy Spirit. It’s a lifestyle characterised by discipline, not impulse.

How do you feel when you want to stand and you see yourself on the floor? Sometimes what God will ask you to do will knock you down. What do you do when God says rise and He pushes you down? How do you feel when very many will become I alone? How do you feel when all the people you told your secrets sale you out? How do you feel when your confidant becomes your betrayal? How do you feel when the person you thought will push you forward told you, I know you will fail? Do you still remember that the bible says that not even a hair will pull of you without being noticed by God? Have you not heard that the steps of a righteous man are ordered by God? How do you handle disappointments? In every situation you find yourself, give God the glory.

During my tenure at Bradford College, located in Haverhill Massachusetts - Assemblies of God, and Northpoint Bible College had not yet taken over. The school was very prestigious and expensive, but was worth every penny spent, and left me with an experience of which I shall indeed never forget. I say this for a couple of reasons. First, my degree major was in creative arts (creative writing) and psychology as my minor. Later in life, I was able to use my degree to become an award-winning, and best-selling horror author, and producer. Something by the way for which I am very proud of today. I truly owe this all from what I learned at this remarkable school." "So indeed I have great things to speak of when harping back to my Bradford college days. In addition, I was also able to make wonderful connections with many famous people who's sons and daughters attended this school. One of my roommates was David Charles who is Bob Charle's son. Bob Charles was a famous professional golfer." "To date, pondering on my college days spent at Bradford College has given me an appreciation for which I am very grateful for. I wanted to say, "thank you" for being part of the reason why I have prospered." "I am a proud graduate of Bradford, and all others whom also attended should also be more than proud of their attendance there. Thank you again, and God Bless you. one of my other roommates was Japanese chap, and his father was some kind of high political ruler of the country at the time. Thinking back on all this makes me proud of having been affiliated with Bradford College. Thank you.

The blessing proved to be prophetic. Boaz and Ruth were married , and the Lord soon blessed them with a son. At the birth of this child, the women of Bethlehem gave a blessing to Naomi as well: Bless be the Lord, who has not left you this day without a close relative; and may his name be famous in Israel! And may he be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age; for your daughter-in-law, who loves you, who is better to you than seven sons, has borne Him.

Had I been further along in my Christian walk and more focused on serving God rather than myself, I might have seen that. But I still had a long way to go in my faith. In my mind, being a Christian meant that God loved me and that He wanted me to be happy, healthy, and successful. I’d been listening to CDs that taught me how to transform my mind, when I should have been immersing myself in the Bible so God could transform my heart through His Word. Up to that point, I’d been treating God like a genie in a lamp, making childish wishes and then waiting for Him to deliver. But God didn’t send His Son to die on the cross so that one day I could become a famous fashion model. He doesn’t exist to serve me; I exist to serve Him.

Mi-ka-el one as well? His name literally means “He who is like an El”.

rebuilt in the Pergamon Museum. The sinister project was completed in 1930, and now you too can behold the famous gates that Daniel must’ve passed through during his exile of Jerusalem if you fly to Germany.

Poetry and Genre The hallmark of rhetoric in ancient Near Eastern literature is repetition; in poetry, this takes the form of what scholars call “parallelism.” Frequently, the first line of a verse is echoed in some way by the second line. The second line might repeat the substance of the first line with slightly different emphasis, or perhaps the second line amplifies the first line in some fashion, such as drawing a logical conclusion, illustrating or intensifying the thought. At times the point of the first line is reinforced by a contrast in the second line. Occasionally, more than two lines are parallel. Each of these features, frequently observed in Biblical psalms, is represented in songs from Egypt, Mesopotamia and Ugarit. Unlike English poetry, which often depends on rhyme for its effect, these ancient cultures attained impact on listeners and readers with creative repetition. Psalms come in several standard subgenres, each with standard formal elements. Praise psalms can be either individual or corporate. Over a third of the psalms in the Psalter are praise psalms. Corporate psalms typically begin with an imperative call to praise (e.g., “Shout for joy to the LORD” [Ps 100:1]) and describe all the good things the Lord has done. Individual praise often begins with a proclamation of intent to praise (e.g., “I will praise you, LORD” [Ps 138:1]) and declare what God has done in a particular situation in the psalmist’s life. Mesopotamian and Egyptian hymns generally focus on descriptive praise, often moving from praise to petition. Examples of the proclamation format can be seen in the Mesopotamian wisdom composition, Ludlul bel nemeqi. The title is the first line of the piece, which is translated “I will praise the lord of wisdom.” As in the individual praise psalms, this Mesopotamian worshiper of Marduk reports about a problem that he had and reports how his god brought him deliverance. Lament psalms may be personal statements of despair (e.g., Ps 22:1–21, dirges following the death of an important person (cf. David’s elegy for Saul in 2Sa 1:17–27) or communal cries in times of crisis (e.g., Ps 137). The most famous lament form from ancient Mesopotamia is the “Lament Over the Destruction of Ur,” which commemorates the capture of the city in 2004 BC by the Elamite king Kindattu. For more information on this latter category, see the article “Neo-Sumerian Laments.” In the book of Psalms, more than a third of the psalms are laments, mostly by an individual. The most common complaints concern sickness and oppression by enemies. The lament literature of Mesopotamia is comprised of a number of different subgenres described by various technical terms. Some of these subgenres overlap with Biblical categories, but most of the Mesopotamian pieces are associated with incantations (magical rites being performed to try to rid the person of the problem). Nevertheless, the petitions that accompany lament in the Bible are very similar to those found in prayers from the ancient Near East. They include requests for guidance, protection, favor, attention from the deity, deliverance from crisis, intervention, reconciliation, healing and long life. Prayers to deities preserved

Eyeballs for eyeballs”, Calley said. “One of your famous Bible regulations.

there is not one person in a thousand who does not hold to some kind of superstition, and those most given to ridiculing the belief in witchcraft of past ages, believe in omens, prognostics, dreams and revelations. They carry a rabbit’s foot or buckeye, keep a horse shoe over or under the door, see spectres stalking around a table of thirteen, or could not be induced to start a journey or begin any work on Friday, and since people of the present day cannot explain the phenomena in spiritual manifestations, mind reading, electric wonders, etc., their ancestors may be excused for believing in witchcraft, inasmuch as they accepted the Bible for the guidance of their faith and believed all it says on this subject, as they did that pertaining to the soul’s salvation, and sought to put away witchcraft, that Christianity might prevail.

Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13–14; Isa 63:15–16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu (“Our Father, our King”) lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

Paul transforms a tribal story, of kings, land, and the purity of one group of people, into a global story of God’s grace and peace to all nations. As famously confusing as Paul’s letters are, if we keep this in mind, a lot of what Paul says will make more sense—such as the following.

The authors of the Bible got visions and revelations, but we get … just a book. And, along with it, communicators who are very human preachers, teachers, and messengers. This is a serious problem for a society like ours, which seems to have a culturewide attention deficit disorder. It is extraordinarily easy to not really hear the Word of God because it comes to us through such nonspectacular means. The Bible is a long book and is by no means a simple read. Preachers and teachers are famously flawed, and every time one of them stumbles, it seems to be a warrant for turning away from the whole Christian enterprise, Bible and all.

Every hysterical refusal of mastership is always in reality the equally hysterical demand for a new and more absolute master, as Jacques Lacan famously saw.

I’d often found it funny how the only reason that writers of self-help books were rich and famous was because of selling their self-help books. Whereas, if there was any truth to these books, the person would have to be rich and famous before writing the book and even then the advice in it would be subjective at best. But then people were stupid. And bad taste, as Bukowski said, created many more millionaires than good taste. If you wanted a good example of people’s bad taste, all you needed to do was to consider the most popular book of all time—the Bible.

self-confidence is the worst of teachers—but from the church's most famous writers.

That famous verse (10.45), drawing together Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7, is not, as so often imagined, a detached statement of atonement-theology, but rather the clinching point in this devastatingly counter-imperial statement about power. That does not mean that it is not about (what we have come to call) ‘atonement’. Rather, it is an invitation to understand atonement itself – God’s dealing on the cross with the sin of the world – as involving God’s victory not so much over the world and its powers (as though God were simply another cheerful 1960s anarchist) but over the worldly ways of power, the ways in which the powers that were created in, through and for Jesus Christ have rebelled and now themselves need to be led, beaten and bedraggled, in his triumphal procession, in order eventually to be reconciled.

Elsa was the more elegant stylist, but both she and Doris wrote in full chords, with emotional and spiritual intelligence, intellectual acuity, and a solid grasp of current events. The theologian Karl Barth famously said that a minister should preach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other; these two women replaced the Bible with texts of their choice. Elsa favored poetry;

We can pick up the minimalist attitude to reading in early visual depictions of one of the heroes of Christian scholarship, St Jerome – who was by all accounts the supreme intellect of Christendom, who translated the Greek and Hebrew portions of the Bible into Latin, wrote a large number of commentaries on scripture and is now the patron saint of libraries and librarians. But despite all his scholarly efforts, when it came to showing where and how St Jerome worked, a detail stands out: there are almost no books in his famous study. Strikingly, the most intelligent and thoughtful intellectual of the early church seems to have read fewer things than an average modern eight year old.

The word dinosaur was coined by a Christian man named Sir Richard Owen, who first used this term in 1841, which is about 200–300 years after the Bible had been put into English. Richard Owen was a famous comparative anatomist, biologist, and paleontologist from England and was the founder and first superintendent of the British Museum of Natural History (now called the Natural History Museum in London due to a name change in 1992).

Even if you see it coming, even as your final weeks are filled with emotional good-byes, the day itself is still a blur. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled in the span of a few hours. Just like that, there are new heads on new pillows—new temperaments, new dreams. And when it ends, when you walk out the door that last time from the world’s most famous address, you’re left in many ways to find yourself again.

At the very beginning of the poetic argument, we entered the world of Job’s inner torment through the great death wish poem that takes up all of Chapter 3. These first thirty seven lines of God’s response to Job constitute a brilliantly pointed reversal, in structure, image, and theme, of that initial poem of Job’s. Perhaps the best way to sense the special weight of disputation over theodicy is to observe that it is cast in the form of a clash between two modes of poetry, one kind spoken by man and, however memorable, appropriate to the limitations of his creaturely condition, the other kind of verse a poet of genius could persuasively imagine God speaking…. Perhaps the finest illustration of this nice match of meaning and imagery between the two poems is the beautiful counterbalance between the most haunting of Job’s lines wishing for darkness and the most exquisite of God’s lines affirming light. Job, one recalls, tried to conjure up an eternal starless night: “Let its twilight stars go dark, / let it hope for light in vain, / and let it not see the eyelids of the dawn” (3:9). God, near the beginning of His first discourse, evokes the moment when creation was completed in an image that has become justly famous in its own right but that is also, it should be observed, a counterimage to 3:9: “When the morning stars sang together, / and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (verse 7). That is, instead of a night with no twilight stars, with no glimmer of dawn, the morning stars of creation exult. The emphasis in this line on song and shouts of joy also takes us back to the poem of Chapter 3, which began with a triumphant cry on the night of conception—a cry Job wanted to wish away—and proceeded to a prayer that no joyous exclamation come into that night (3:7).

The Bible is relevant and real, and the people who inhabit its pages are people who have faced what you and I face. Life has disappointed them, others have disappointed them, and they have disappointed themselves. Just like us. Remarkably, amazingly and delightfully, these people are the people God uses. The disappointed ones. Sneaky and snarly people who often acted before they thought, who failed to act when they should have and sometimes didn’t act at all. Yet they were called friends of God. The man who named the people of Israel, Jacob, was a mama’s boy. The one who became brave enough to stand up to his wealthy adopted family and side with the oppressed immigrant workers, Moses, lived with a stubborn insecurity. Rahab, a woman whose circumstances led to her prostituting herself, became the one who helped establish a country for the “pure and holy” people of God. King David, famous for his devotion to God, gave into his voracious sexual appetites and passion. These are the ones God calls friends: people like the great prophet Elijah who struggled with depression, fear and a weird streak of pride that caused him to do an ugly power play over the fate of two little boys. Jonah, the prophet to the ancient city of Nineveh, who didn’t want to go because of his racism. John the Baptist, who would today likely be holed up in Idaho somewhere, living off his produce and writing treatises against the government and church.

Famously the KJV translates agapē as ‘charity’. Many grumbled when modern translations replaced it with ‘love’. Not many realized that the modern translations were simply reverting to what Tyndale had had in the first place.