Romans Bible Quotes

What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31 NIV) a

If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you a spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus, so that with one heart and mouth you may glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

For I am convinced that neither death nor life neither angels nor demons neither the present nor the future nor any powers neither height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38

4. Religion. Your reason is now mature enough to examine this object. In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty & singularity of opinion... shake off all the fears & servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. You will naturally examine first, the religion of your own country. Read the Bible, then as you would read Livy or Tacitus. The facts which are within the ordinary course of nature, you will believe on the authority of the writer, as you do those of the same kind in Livy and Tacitus. The testimony of the writer weighs in their favor, in one scale, and their not being against the laws of nature, does not weigh against them. But those facts in the Bible which contradict the laws of nature, must be examined with more care, and under a variety of faces. Here you must recur to the pretensions of the writer to inspiration from God. Examine upon what evidence his pretensions are founded, and whether that evidence is so strong, as that its falsehood would be more improbable than a change in the laws of nature, in the case he relates. For example in the book of Joshua we are told the sun stood still several hours. Were we to read that fact in Livy or Tacitus we should class it with their showers of blood, speaking of statues, beasts, &c. But it is said that the writer of that book was inspired. Examine therefore candidly what evidence there is of his having been inspired. The pretension is entitled to your inquiry, because millions believe it. On the other hand you are astronomer enough to know how contrary it is to the law of nature that a body revolving on its axis as the earth does, should have stopped, should not by that sudden stoppage have prostrated animals, trees, buildings, and should after a certain time have resumed its revolution, & that without a second general prostration. Is this arrest of the earth's motion, or the evidence which affirms it, most within the law of probabilities? You will next read the New Testament. It is the history of a personage called Jesus. Keep in your eye the opposite pretensions: 1, of those who say he was begotten by God, born of a virgin, suspended & reversed the laws of nature at will, & ascended bodily into heaven; and 2, of those who say he was a man of illegitimate birth, of a benevolent heart, enthusiastic mind, who set out without pretensions to divinity, ended in believing them, and was punished capitally for sedition, by being gibbeted, according to the Roman law, which punished the first commission of that offence by whipping, & the second by exile, or death in fureâ. ...Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you... In fine, I repeat, you must lay aside all prejudice on both sides, and neither believe nor reject anything, because any other persons, or description of persons, have rejected or believed it... I forgot to observe, when speaking of the New Testament, that you should read all the histories of Christ, as well of those whom a council of ecclesiastics have decided for us, to be Pseudo-evangelists, as those they named Evangelists. Because these Pseudo-evangelists pretended to inspiration, as much as the others, and you are to judge their pretensions by your own reason, and not by the reason of those ecclesiastics. Most of these are lost... [Letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, advising him in matters of religion, 1787]

Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It’s an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire. This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures.

Judaea was not a forgotten backwater in the Roman world. Jews represented about ten percent of the population of the western empire and about twenty percent of the population of the eastern empire. By comparison, Jews represent only about two per cent of the population of the United States today. Never, since the fall of Judah to Babylon in the sixth century BC until the twentieth century had Jews comprised so large a part of any body politic.

I do not believe that God intended the study of theology to be dry and boring. Theology is the study of God and all his works! Theology is meant to be LIVED and PRAYED and SUNG! All of the great doctrinal writings of the Bible (such as Paul's epistle to the Romans) are full of praise to God and personal application to life.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. - Romans 5:8

Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy;—but the Father, for love!’181

Let's just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren't.

Rejoice in the hope. Endure under tribulation. Persevere in prayer. -Romans 12:12

Peace is a place of unhindered enjoyment of friendship beyond guilt, suspicion, blame of inferiority

In the Roman world, Ovid’s Metamorphoses – that extraordinary mythological epic about people changing shape (and probably the most influential work of literature on Western art after the Bible) – repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing of women in the process of their transformation.

In my opinion, the greatest sin in the church of Jesus Christ in this generation is ignorance of the Word of God. Many times I have heard a church officer say, "Well I don't know much about the Bible, but..." and then he gives his opinion, which often actually contradicts the Word of God! Why doesn't he know much about the Bible? These things were written aforetime for our learning. God wants you to know His Word.

How I wish that more men who claim to be evangelical really believed the Word of God--that it IS the Word of God, that it is God speaking.

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-- this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-- His good, pleasing, and perfect will." Romans 12:1-2)

At this crucial point, for the Roman Church to reach a compromise between this myth of Mithra and the Hellenistic Christianity of St. Paul, it was necessary to have a sudden change of events or an altered version of Jesus's life, and it was here that the Roman Church began to implement a psychological process known today as Cognitive Dissonance. In a few words, this happens when a group of people produce a false reconstruction of an event they want to continue to believe in, a literary strategy also known as the Reconstructive Hypothesis. This theological notion is equally known as Apotheosis or the glorification of a subject to divine level such as a human becoming a god. In the case of Jesus, this process was copied in its entirety from the religion of Mithra where their 'divinisations' were practically the same.

Jesus did not simply die to save us from our sins; Jesus lived to save us from our sins. His life and teachings show us the way to liberation. But you can't fit all that on a bumper sticker. So we try to boil it down to a formula. Four steps. The "Romans Road." John 3:16. And yet the gospel itself, in its eternal scope and scandalous particularity, defies reduction.

The Bible says, “For the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (Romans 14:17). The Holy Spirit brings to us the joy of God’s presence.

In the Bible, man is only free to submit or be damned. His one freedom is the renunciation of that freedom. He finds his “salvation” by freely accepting his subjugation. The Christian ideal, says Saint Paul, is to be freely “subservient to God” (Romans 6:22).

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.

The historical problems with Luke are even more pronounced. For one thing, we have relatively good records for the reign of Caesar Augustus, and there is no mention anywhere in any of them of an empire-wide census for which everyone had to register by returning to their ancestral home. And how could such a thing even be imagined? Joesph returns to Bethlehem because his ancestor David was born there. But David lived a thousand years before Joseph. Are we to imagine that everyone in the Roman Empire was required to return to the homes of their ancestors from a thousand years earlier? If we had a new worldwide census today and each of us had to return to the towns of our ancestors a thousand years back—where would you go? Can you imagine the total disruption of human life that this kind of universal exodus would require? And can you imagine that such a project would never be mentioned in any of the newspapers? There is not a single reference to any such census in any ancient source, apart from Luke. Why then does Luke say there was such a census? The answer may seem obvious to you. He wanted Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, even though he knew he came from Nazareth ... there is a prophecy in the Old Testament book of Micah that a savior would come from Bethlehem. What were these Gospel writer to do with the fact that it was widely known that Jesus came from Nazareth? They had to come up with a narrative that explained how he came from Nazareth, in Galilee, a little one-horse town that no one had ever heard of, but was born in Bethlehem, the home of King David, royal ancestor of the Messiah.

Human beings are comfortable with what is outward, visible, material and superficial. What matters to God is a deep, inward, secret work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts.

...it is a mistake to reduce every decision about Christian living to a "Heaven-or-Hell issue." For example, some ask if the Bible specifically says a certain action is a "sin" or will send them to "Hell." If not, they feel free to indulge in that action unreservedly and ignore any scriptural principles involved. But this approach is legalistic, which means living by rules or basing salvation on works. It treats the Bible as a law book, focusing on the letter and looking for loopholes. By contrast, the Bible tells us that we are saved by grace through faith, not by our works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Grace teaches us how to live righteously, and faith leads us into obedience. (See Titus 2:11-12; Romans1:5; Hebrews 11:7-8.)

The “Gospel” is not a sermon title or the name of a book in the Bible. The Gospel is the person of Jesus Christ and it is the power of God to bring people to salvation. Romans 1:16

Mr. Perkins adviseth, in the reading of the Scriptures, to begin with the Gospel of John, and this Epistle to the Romans, as being the keys of the New Testament.

The size of the Roman Empire allowed Jesus’s teaching to spread within its expansive borders, but it was also the power of the empire that allowed the message of Jesus to be heard.

when theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called “liberation theologians,” but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled “domination theologians” or “colonization theologians.” Similarly, we have “black theology” and “feminist theology,” but Greco-Roman orthodoxy is never called “white theology” or “male theology.

It is important for Christians to spend time praying with or in the spirit—that is, praying in tongues. The Bible says, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

God cannot always give us a satisfactory answer, because our finite minds cannot grasp the thoughts of the infinite. His thoughts are high above our thoughts, and His ways above our ways (see Isaiah 55:9), but we can trust God, always! “In all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

The New Testament also primarily places the blame for mankind’s original sin on Adam, not Eve. In Romans 5:12, we learn that “sin came into the world through one man [emphasis added] and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned.” In 1 Corinthians 15:22 Paul declares, “or as in Adam [emphasis added] all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.

Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority?

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther’s Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn’t the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now—that is the point.

Why should I say I can’t when the Bible says I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength (Philippians 4:13)?  2. Why should I worry about my needs when I know that God will take care of all my needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Philippians 4:19)?  3. Why should I fear when the Bible says God has not given me a spirit of fear, but of power, love and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7)?  4. Why should I lack faith to live for Christ when God has given me a measure of faith (Romans 12:3)?  5. Why should I be weak when the Bible says that the Lord is the strength of my life and that I will display strength and take action because I know God (Psalm 27:1; Daniel 11:32)?

Long before there was ever a King James Version of our Bible, there was a gospel truth...and long before doctrines and denominations, the preeminence of the gospel was already ripe to harvest. Before man had ever thought about creating symbols to represent spiritual things...there was a gospel.

The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one.

In Christianity, God has promised to avenge attacks against His people. We trust the One who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay” (Romans 12:19 KJV)—but to the Muslim mind, this makes us look like cowards. In Islam, it’s the opposite: the people are commanded to punish insults to the honor of Allah and Muhammad.

It is not fashionable to quote Stalin but he said once, "half a million liquidated is a statistic, but one man killed in a traffic accident is a national tragedy." He was laughing, you see, at the bourgeois sensitivities of the mass. He was a cynic. But what he meant is still true: a movement which protects itself against counter-revolution can hardly stop at the exploitation - or the elimination, Leamas - of a few individuals. It is all one, we have never pretended to be wholly just in the process of rationalising society. Some Roman said it, didn't he, in the Christian Bible - it is expedient that one man should die for the benefit of many.

Similarly, some biblical views of women are superior to others. And so the apostle Paul’s attitude about women is that they could be and should be leaders of the Christian communities—as evidenced by the fact that in his own communities there were women who were church organizers, deacons, and even apostles (Romans 16). That attitude is much better than the one inserted by a later scribe into Paul’s letter of 1 Corinthians, which claims women should always be silent in the church (1 Corinthians 14:35–36), or the one forged under Paul’s name in the letter of 1 Timothy, which insists that women remain silent, submissive, and pregnant (1 Timothy 2:11–15).

If God is for us, who can be against us? (Romans 8:31b NKJV)

Romans 8: 28: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. Romans 6:6

For we know that our old self was crucified with him so the the body of sin might be brought to nothing, that we should no longer be enslaved to sin.

If you have Jesus Christ, then you are no longer a slave to the forces of this sinful world; you are untouchable and unstoppable.Romans 8:15

Sooner or later we must leave our dream world and face up to the facts of God, sin, and judgment. The Bible says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” [Romans 3:23 NIV].

It’s found in a Bible verse: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:a). In this verse Paul tells us that change begins on the inside, through the renewing of the mind. So the best way to approach weight loss isn’t to focus on saying no to the cinnamon roll. It’s to focus on changing the thoughts that make us want to say yes.

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or “Bible” of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called “mystical experiences” in every religion are true. He should have known better.

Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,” precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.

Jesus, not dogma, is the center of the Bible. Some seem to regard a condition of salvation as the center of Christianity! But conditions are significant only because they are responses to Jesus as "Lord and Christ." (Acts 2:36).

Perhaps the most dangerous verse in all the Bible is the second verse of Romans 12, where Saint Paul endorses Christian nonconformity. When he writes, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God,” he is telling his readers not to do that which comes naturally to them. An invitation to nonconformity is a dangerous thing, and thoughtful nonconformity, for that is what Paul is requiring, is all the more dangerous because nonconformity is an intention and not an inadvertence. In a culture in which conformity is valued, nonconformity is likely to get one into trouble.

I think one of the most interesting and paradigm-shifting verses in the Bible is Romans 12v1 where Paul says, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is true worship.” Notice Paul’s language. Offer your bodies. Not your souls, your bodies! True sanctification and worship of God involves your soul and your body. God is after all of you. We worship by caring for our spiritual life, by reading the scriptures, prayer, and the disciplines. And we worship by going on a run, eating healthy and whole foods, spending time outside in praise of the Creator, and watching over the bodies God has blessed us with. True worship is holistic.

When it grew cold enough to shut the doors, and have fire at night, first thing after supper all of us helped clear the table, then we took our slates and books and learned our lessons for the next day, and then father lined us against the wall, all in a row from Laddie down, and he pronounced words—easy ones that divided into syllables nicely, for me, harder for May, and so up until I might sit down. For Laddie, May and Leon he used the geography, the Bible, Roland's history, the Christian Advocate, and the Agriculturist. My, but he had them so they could spell! After that, as memory tests, all of us recited our reading lesson for the next day, especially the poetry pieces. I knew most of them, from hearing the big folks repeat them so often and practise the proper way to read them. I could do "Rienzi's Address to the Romans," "Casablanca," "Gray's Elegy," or "Mark Antony's Speech," but best of all, I liked "Lines to a Water-fowl." When he was tired, if it were not bedtime yet, all of us, boys too, sewed rags for carpet and rugs. Laddie braided corn husks for the kitchen and outside door mats, and they were pretty, and "very useful too," like the dog that got his head patted in McGuffey's Second.

So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.

In other words, contrary to what many people assume, we don't fall from a state of complete innocence into sin individually, on our own. But Adam, who in effect was acting as an agent and proxy for the entire human race, plunged all of humanity at once into sin. In the words of Romans 5:19, By one man's disobedience many were made sinners".Every one of Adam's progeny was condemned by his actions. And that is why the whole human race is said to be guilty because of what he did, and not because of what Eve did.

Who cares what the Bible means to me? We need to know what it means. That's where I have to allow God to redefine my thinking. He tells us in Romans 12:2 not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. What always gets me about this verse is he's telling believers we still need to be transformed. It means I have a saved spirit but I still think with a lost brain, and slowly but surely my mind has to be transformed. Such transformation comes but one way - by truth. By his Word.

The Bible was written by Jewish people who belonged to a Jewish minority living under the oppression of a succession of massive military superpowers who had conquered them: The Egyptians, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans. These

Happiness is part of being whole. It means having an understanding of your identity and purpose, an established feeling of acceptance and value, and a sense of destiny, joy, and peace -- all of which produce overall well-being. It is impossible to be consistently happy without these characteristics. All people need to know who they are, why they are here, and to whom they belong. Having an understanding of who we are in Christ is foundational to the belief system that allows us to possess these qualities. The Bible says in Romans 14:17 that the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit. You find in this passage all these characteristics that grow out of being in right relationship with God. His presence is always accompanied by peace and joy; in other words, a sense of total well-being.

To read the Bible and then conclude it means anything other than being deeply loved by God, conformed to the image of Jesus (Romans 8:29), and extending his message of repentance and belief in the gospel (Mark 1:14), simply misses the point of each book, sixty-six times in a row.

The gospel that Paul is proclaiming in Romans does not center on the issue of sexuality. It focuses on the universality of sin and the free grace of salvation through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is the essence of the Christian message. Idolatry, Not Sexuality

By the early fifth century, the Church that had begun as a tiny group of fishermen and other poor people meeting in modest abodes had joined the Roman trend in classical culture in becoming logocentric, relying heavily on written texts -- the Bible, the sacramental services, and the theology of the Church Fathers. "Beginning as a movement in Egypt around 200 A.D. and reaching France by 500 A.D., a special place of holiness was attributed to monks and nuns in a monastic setting because of their celibacy. Monks often became bishops; nuns were told to stay in their convents and shut up.

It is impossible to overrate the importance of Homer on the culture and religion of ancient Greece. It is not that the Iliad and the Odyssey were “the Bible” the way the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament were for later Jews and Christians. No one thought these epics were “the inspired and infallible Word of God.” But they were thoroughly known and deeply influential for people in the Greek and Roman worlds as they thought about their lives and the nature of the divine realm. In particular, the views of the afterlife propounded by Homer were massively influential for centuries to come.

Martin Luther arrived at his earthshaking conclusions imbued with biblical exposition. As a professor, he taught the book of Psalms verse by verse from 1513 to 1515, Romans from 1515 to 1516, Galatians from 1516 until 1517, the book of Hebrews from 1517 to 1518 and then the Psalms again from 1519 until 1521.

The improved odds of a natural death came with another price, captured by the Roman historian Tacitus: “Formerly we suffered from crimes; now we suffer from laws.” The Bible stories we examined in chapter 1 suggest that the first kings kept their subjects in awe with totalistic ideologies and brutal punishments.

The Latin Church, which I constantly find myself admiring, despite its occasional astounding imbecilities, has always kept clearly before it the fact that religion is not a syllogism, but a poem. It is accused by Protestant dervishes of withholding the Bible from the people. To some extent this is true; to some extent the church is wise; again to the same extent it is prosperous. ... Rome indeed has not only preserved the original poetry of Christianity; it has also made capital additions to that poetry -- for example, the poetry of the saints, of Mary, and of the liturgy itself. A solemn high mass is a thousand times as impressive, to a man with any genuine religious sense in him, as the most powerful sermon ever roared under the big top by Presbyterian auctioneer of God. In the face of such overwhelming beauty it is not necessary to belabor the faithful with logic; they are better convinced by letting them alone. Preaching is not an essential part of the Latin ceremonial. It was very little employed in the early church, and I am convinced that good effects would flow from abandoning it today, or, at all events, reducing it to a few sentences, more or less formal. In the United States the Latin brethren have been seduced by the example of the Protestants, who commonly transform an act of worship into a puerile intellectual exercise; instead of approaching God in fear and wonder these Protestants settle back in their pews, cross their legs, and listen to an ignoramus try to prove that he is a better theologian than the Pope. This folly the Romans now slide into. Their clergy begin to grow argumentative, doctrinaire, ridiculous. It is a pity. A bishop in his robes, playing his part in the solemn ceremonial of the mass, is a dignified spectacle; the same bishop, bawling against Darwin half an hour later, is seen to be simply an elderly Irishman with a bald head, the son of a respectable police sergeant in South Bend, Ind. Let the reverend fathers go back to Bach. If they keep on spoiling poetry and spouting ideas, the day will come when some extra-bombastic deacon will astound humanity and insult God by proposing to translate the liturgy into American, that all the faithful may be convinced by it.

Paul is not talking in Romans 1:26–27 about a violation of the order of creation. In Paul’s vocabulary, physis (nature) is not a synonym for ktisis (creation). In speaking about what is “natural,” Paul is merely accepting the conventional view of people and how they ought to behave in first-century Hellenistic-Jewish culture.

The difference between us and the papists is that they do not think that the church can be 'the pillar of the truth' unless she presides over the word of God. We, on the other hand, assert that it is because she reverently subjects herself to the word of God that the truth is preserved by her and passed on to others by her hands.

A Christian must reject the philosophy of existentialism, but he must emphasize what is truly existential, for the Bible does not teach a static situation in which one becomes a Christian and that’s it. Rather, it teaches that time is moving, and a relationship to God is important at every given existential moment. Consequently, you do not begin the Christian life by faith and then remain static. You continue to live it by faith. Much of Paul’s teaching from Romans 5 on deals with this. The Christian, then, should be the true existentialist, moving upon the knife-edge of time, in every given moment being in relationship with God. Moment-by-moment living by faith

The only book Papa had ever read, apart from the Bible, was Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He believed that the even greater British Empire would go the same way unless noblemen fought to preserve its institutions, especially the Royal Navy, the Church of England, and the Conservative Party. He was right, Fitz had no doubt.

There is a time when mercy has to be shown. It has to be shown with gracious kindliness, Paul says. It is possible to forgive in such a way that the very forgiveness is an insult. It is possible to forgive and at the same time to demonstrate an attitude of criticism and contempt. If we ever have to forgive a sinner, we must remember that we are fellow sinners. 'There, but for the grace of God, go I,' said the Methodist, George Whitefield, as he saw the criminal walk to the gallows. There is a way of forgiving which pushes people further into the gutter; and there is a way of forgiving them which lifts them out of the mire. Real forgiveness is always based on love and never on superiority.

ROMANS 12 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, [1] by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. [2] 2Do not be conformed to this world, [3] but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. [4]

ROMANS 12  z I appeal to you therefore, brothers, [1] by the mercies of God,  a to present your bodies  b as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. [2] 2 c Do not be conformed to this world, [3] but be transformed by  d the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may  e discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. [4]

But the Bible contains incredible good news. The Creator is also the Redeemer. In a radical act of compassion and grace, the Creator entered into His creation to redeem fallen man. This is the only way redemption could have occurred. Your Creator took upon Himself human flesh and gave Himself to pay the penalty for your sin so that you could be restored to an intimate relationship with Him (2 Cor. 5:21). You are a rational being. You can fully understand these wonderful truths. Further, you are responsible; you must make a decision to commit your life to Christ. Listen to Romans 10:9-10: “That if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you shall be saved; for with the heart man believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation.

Acts 24:24 in 1611 referred to Drusilla, the wife of the Roman governor Felix, as a Jew; in 1629, this was altered to “Jewess.” The original translation of Mark 10:18 read thus: “there is no man good, but one, that is, God.” This could be misunderstood as implying that God was a human being. A small alteration was introduced in 1638, avoiding this implication: the text now read “there is none good but one, that is, God.

But the Catholic Church had another agenda for the Black (Israelite) people living in Africa.  They had to change what the natives in Africa already knew about the Old Testament and then add the New Testaments teachings, but with a “White Supremacy” Europeanized twist.  The first thing they had to do was establish the “Whiteness” of the Bible starting with Adam, Eve, Abraham, Jacob, the Children of Israel all the way down to Yeshua Mashiach (Jesus Christ).  They had to do away with the Sabbath and force the slaves to forget their laws.  They had to explain the Black Negro slaves’ role in the bible as “Cursed Canaanites”.   The “Gentile” Europeans (Greeks, Romans etc.) had to write and insert themselves into the Bible using the Apocrypha Books with the mysterious appearance of the White Greek Jewish Maccabean family.   Many of the Blacks in Africa bought this lie and continued to teach this to their children generation after generation. 

What a revolution! In less than a century the persecuted church had become a persecuting church. Its enemies, the “heretics” (those who “selected” from the totality of the Catholic faith), were now also the enemies of the empire and were punished accordingly. For the first time now Christians killed other Christians because of differences in their views of the faith. This is what happened in Trier in 385: despite many objections, the ascetic and enthusiastic Spanish lay preacher Priscillian was executed for heresy together with six companions. People soon became quite accustomed to this idea. Above all the Jews came under pressure. The proud Roman Hellenistic state church hardly remembered its own Jewish roots anymore. A specifically Christian ecclesiastical anti-Judaism developed out of the pagan state anti-Judaism that already existed. There were many reasons for this: the breaking off of conversations between the church and the synagogue and mutual isolation; the church’s exclusive claim to the Hebrew Bible; the crucifixion of Jesus, which was now generally attributed to the Jews; the dispersion of Israel, which was seen as God’s just curse on a damned people who were alleged to have broken the covenant with God . . . Almost exactly a century after Constantine’s death, by special state-church laws under Theodosius II, Judaism was removed from the sacral sphere, to which one had access only through the sacraments (that is, through baptism). The first repressive measures

Sin also is defined in the Bible as faithless independence: “Whatever is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14: 23). It is an attitude of “lawlessness” (1 John 3: 4). In light of this understanding of sin, what then does repentance involve? Repentance means stepping out of independence back into dependence, and the measure of your repentance will be the measure of your dependence. Every area of your life in which you have not learned to be truly dependent on God is an area of your life in which you have not as yet repented.

Many modern readers assume teachings about wives submitting to their husbands appear exclusively in the pages of Scripture and thus reflect uniquely “biblical” views about women’s roles in the home. But to the people who first heard these letters read aloud in their churches, the words of Peter and Paul would have struck them as both familiar and strange, a sort of Christian remix on familiar Greco-Roman philosophy that positioned the male head of house as the rightful ruler over his subordinate wives, children, and slaves. By instructing men to love their wives and respect their slaves, and by telling everyone to “submit to one another” with Jesus as the ultimate head of house, the apostles offer correctives to cultural norms without upending them. They challenge new believers to reconsider their relationships with one another now that, in Christ, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Galatians 3:28). The plot thickens when we pay attention to some of the recurring characters in the Epistles and see a progression toward more freedom and autonomy for slaves like Onesimus and women like Nympha, Priscilla, Junia, and Lydia.

ROMANS 15  sWe who are strong  thave an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. 2 uLet each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. 3For  vChrist did not please himself, but as it is written,  w“The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me.” 4For  xwhatever was written in former days was written for our  yinstruction, that through endurance and through  zthe encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. 5May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you  ato live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus,

Les Poets de Sept ans Et la Mère, fermant le livre du devoir, S'en allait satisfaite et très fière sans voir, Dans les yeux bleus et sous le front plein d'éminences, L'âme de son enfant livrée aux répugnances. Tout le jour, il suait d'obéissance ; très Intelligent ; pourtant des tics noirs, quelques traits Semblaient prouver en lui d'âcres hypocrisies. Dans l'ombre des couloirs aux tentures moisies, En passant il tirait la langue, les deux poings A l'aine, et dans ses yeux fermés voyait des points. Une porte s'ouvrait sur le soir : à la lampe On le voyait, là-haut, qui râlait sur la rampe, Sous un golfe de jour pendant du toit. L'été Surtout, vaincu, stupide, il était entêté A se renfermer dans la fraîcheur des latrines: Il pensait là, tranquille et livrant ses narines. Quand, lavé des odeurs du jour, le jardinet Derrière la maison, en hiver, s'illunait , Gisant au pied d'un mur, enterré dans la marne Et pour des visions écrasant son oeil darne, Il écoutait grouiller les galeux espaliers. Pitié ! Ces enfants seuls étaient ses familiers Qui, chétifs, fronts nus, oeil déteignant sur la joue, Cachant de maigres doigts jaunes et noirs de boue Sous des habits puant la foire et tout vieillots, Conversaient avec la douceur des idiots ! Et si, l'ayant surpris à des pitiés immondes, Sa mère s'effrayait, les tendresses profondes, De l'enfant se jetaient sur cet étonnement. C'était bon. Elle avait le bleu regard, - qui ment! A sept ans, il faisait des romans, sur la vie Du grand désert où luit la Liberté ravie, Forêts, soleils, rives, savanes ! - Il s'aidait De journaux illustrés où, rouge, il regardait Des Espagnoles rire et des Italiennes. Quand venait, l'Oeil brun, folle, en robes d'indiennes, -Huit ans -la fille des ouvriers d'à côté, La petite brutale, et qu'elle avait sauté, Dans un coin, sur son dos, en secouant ses tresses, Et qu'il était sous elle, il lui mordait les fesses, Car elle ne portait jamais de pantalons; - Et, par elle meurtri des poings et des talons, Remportait les saveurs de sa peau dans sa chambre. Il craignait les blafards dimanches de décembre, Où, pommadé, sur un guéridon d'acajou, Il lisait une Bible à la tranche vert-chou; Des rêves l'oppressaient, chaque nuit, dans l'alcôve. Il n'aimait pas Dieu; mais les hommes qu'au soir fauve, Noirs, en blouse, il voyait rentrer dans le faubourg Où les crieurs, en trois roulements de tambour, Font autour des édits rire et gronder les foules. - Il rêvait la prairie amoureuse, où des houles Lumineuses, parfums sains, pubescences d'or, Font leur remuement calme et prennent leur essor ! Et comme il savourait surtout les sombres choses, Quand, dans la chambre nue aux persiennes closes, Haute et bleue, âcrement prise d'humidité, Il lisait son roman sans cesse médité, Plein de lourds ciels ocreux et de forêts noyées, De fleurs de chair aux bois sidérals déployées, Vertige, écroulement, déroutes et pitié ! - Tandis que se faisait la rumeur du quartier, En bas, - seul et couché sur des pièces de toile Écrue et pressentant violemment la voile!

JUNIA: An Apostle above Other Apostles Do you know who Junia is?3 Here’s all we know: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Jews who have been in prison with me. They are outstanding among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was” (Romans 16:7, emphasis added). Here are words of utter profundity, words that have been silenced like a blue parakeet perhaps more than any other words in the Bible about women: “outstanding among the apostles.” Junia is an outstanding apostle, though to be sure, being a woman had little to do with it. What mattered were her intelligence, her giftedness, and her calling.

They follow the argumentation of the Declaration of Independence, which declares that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are divinely endowed rights. Therefore those believers say such rights are part of a Christian worldview, worth attaining and defending at all costs, including military insurrection at times. But such a position is contrary to the clear teachings and commands of Romans 13:1–7. So the United States was actually born out of a violation of New Testament principles, and any blessings that God has bestowed on America have come in spite of that disobedience by the Founding Fathers. Also,

From antiquity onward, Torah scrolls were treated as objects of veneration, and imagined to have (for example) health-giving properties. This Jewish idea that the book embodied the divinity of its sacred subject matter shaped the formation of the Christian Bible and the Qur’an. From antiquity onward, the idea of a material book as the ultimate source of truth has persisted. The Roman emperor Justinian passed a law in AD 530 requiring the presence of “holy scriptures” in court throughout proceedings; in the United Kingdom, as recently as 2013 the Magistrates’ Association reaffirmed the need for witnesses to swear on sacred texts.

The average Christian is not supposed to know that Jesus’ home town of Nazareth did not actually exist, or that key places mentioned in the Bible did not physically exist in the so-called “Holy Land.” He is not meant to know that scholars have had greater success matching Biblical events and places with events and places in Britain rather than in Palestine. It is a point of contention whether the settlement of Nazareth existed at all during Jesus' lifetime. It does not appear on contemporary maps, neither in any books, documents, chronicles or military records of the period, whether of Roman or Jewish compilation. The Jewish Encyclopedia identifies that Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, neither in the works of Josephus, nor in the Hebrew Talmud – Laurence Gardner (The Grail Enigma) As far back as 1640, the German traveller Korte, after a complete topographical examination of the present Jerusalem, decided that it failed to coincide in any way with the city described by Josephus and the Scriptures. Claims that the tombs of patriarchs Ab’Ram, Isaac, and Jacob are buried under a mosque in Hebron possess no shred of evidence. The rock-cut sepulchres in the valleys of Jehoshaphat and Hinnom are of Roman period with late Greek inscriptions, and there exists nothing in groups of ruins at Petra, Sebaste, Baalbec, Palmyra or Damascus, or among the stone cities of the Haran, that are pre-Roman. Nothing in Jerusalem itself can be related to the Jews – Comyns Beaumont (Britain: Key to World’s History) The Jerusalem of modern times is not the city of the Scriptures. Mt. Calvary, now nearly in the centre of the city, was without walls at the time of the Crucifixion, and the greater part of Mt. Zion, which is not without, was within the ancient city. The holy places are for the most part the fanciful dreams of monkish enthusiasts to increase the veneration of the pilgrims – Rev. J. P. Lawson (quoted in Beaumont’s Britain: Key to World’s History)

In the New Testament, God's steadfast love and faithfulness are seen, not in an act of deliverance from foreign enemies, but in sending the Son and raising Him from the dead to enact a global rescue mission (Romans 8:3.) Jesus is God's supreme, grand, climactic act of faithfulness. Not only that, but "faithful" also describes Jesus. Paul writes, "We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but in faith in Jesus Christ" (Galations 2:16...). A better reading is "faithfulness of Jesus Christ" -- which is found in footnotes of many Bibles -- and the two readings couldn't be more different... Paul isn't saying, "You are not justified by your efforts but by your faith." The contrast he's making isn't between two options we have; the contrast is between your efforts and Jesus' faithfulness to you, shown in His obedient death on a Roman cross. Paul is interested in telling readers what Jesus did, Jesus' faithfulness, not what we do. God's grand act of faithfulness is giving His son for our sake. God is all in. Jesus' grand act of faithfulness is going through with it for our sake. Jesus is all in. Now it's our move, which really is the point of all this. Like God the Father and God the Son, we are also called to be faithful. On one level, we are faithful to God when we trust God, but faith (pistis) doesn't stop there. It extends, as we've seen, in faithfulness toward each other, in humility and self-sacrificial love. And here is the real kick in the pants: When we are faithful to each other like this, we are more than simply being nice and kind -- though there's that. Far more important, when we are faithful to each other, we are, at that moment, acting like the faithful God and the faithful Son. Being like God. That's the goal. And we are most like God, not when we are certain we are right about God, or when we tell others how right we are, but when we are acting toward one another like the faithful Father and Son. Humility, love, and kindness are our grand acts of faithfulness and how we show that we are all in.

Any Justification that does not lead to Biblical sanctification and mortification of sinful desires is a false justification no matter how many Solas you attach to it”. “See that your chief study be about the heart, that there God’s image may be planted, and his interest advanced, and the interest of the world and flesh subdued, and the love of every sin cast out, and the love of holiness succeed; and that you content not yourselves with seeming to do good in outward acts, when you are bad yourselves, and strangers to the great internal duties. The first and great work of a Christian is about his heart.” ~ Richard Baxter Never forget that truth is more important to the church than peace ~ JC Ryle "Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.” ~ Francis Schaeffer I am not permitted to let my love be so merciful as to tolerate and endure false doctrine. When faith and doctrine are concerned and endangered, neither love nor patience are in order...when these are concerned, (neither toleration nor mercy are in order, but only anger, dispute, and destruction - to be sure, only with the Word of God as our weapon. ~ Martin Luther “Truth must be spoken, however it be taken.” ~ John Trapp “Hard words, if they be true, are better than soft words if they be false.” – C.H. Spurgeon “Oh my brethren, Bold hearted men are always called mean-spirited by cowards” – CH Spurgeon “The Bible says Iron sharpens Iron, But if your words don't have any iron in them, you ain't sharpening anyone”. “Peace often comes as a result of conflict!” ~ Don P Mt 18:15-17 Rom 12:18 “Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” ~ Martin Luther “The Scriptures argue and debate and dispute; they are full of polemics… We should always regret the necessity; but though we regret it and bemoan it, when we feel that a vital matter is at stake we must engage in argument. We must earnestly contend for the truth, and we are all called upon to do that by the New Testament.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones (Romans – Atonement and Justification) “It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.” ~ Henry Ward Beecher “Truth bites and it stings and it has a blade on it.” ~ Paul Washer Soft words produce hard hearts. Show me a church where soft words are preached and I will show you a church of hard hearts. Jeremiah said that the word of God is a hammer that shatters. Hard Preaching produces soft hearts. ~ J. MacArthur Glory follows afflictions, not as the day follows the night but as the spring follows the winter; for the winter prepares the earth for the spring, so do afflictions sanctified, prepare the soul for glory. ~ Richard Sibbes “Cowards never won heaven. Do not claim that you are begotten of God and have His royal blood running in your veins unless you can prove your lineage by this heroic spirit: to dare to be holy in spite of men and devils.” ~ William Gurnall

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

It is characteristic of the faith of the Christian that through God’s grace and the merit of Jesus Christ he has become entirely justified and guiltless in God’s eyes, so that “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8: 1 ). And it is characteristic of the prayer of the Christian to hold fast to this innocence and justification which has come to him, appealing to God’s word and thanking for it. So not only are we permitted, but directly obligated–provided we take God’s action to us at all seriously–to pray in all humiliation and certainty: “I was blameless before him and I kept myself from guilt” (Psalm 18:23); “If thou testest me thou wilt find no wickedness in me” (Psalm 17:3). With such a prayer we stand in the center of the New Testament, in the community of the cross of Jesus Christ.

There was now a commercial reason for removing the Apocrypha—Bibles without it were both cheaper to produce, and smaller (and hence cheaper to transport overseas). Sensitive to the importance of both production and transportation costs, the missionary societies gradually came to the view that the Apocrypha would be omitted—primarily for financial, rather than theological reasons. As far as is known, the first missionary society to take this decision was the British and Foreign Bible Society. Its decision of 1826 to cease including the Apocrypha in their Bibles is known to have given a major stimulus to the growing trend to publish Bibles without the Apocrypha. In very general terms, Bibles produced for a predominantly Protestant readership now tend to exclude the Apocrypha, and those intended for a Roman Catholic readership include it.

The truth is a powerful thing: it does not allow a person to remain undisturbed. Some embrace and follow the truth. Some reject it outright. Others prefer to ignore it. employing what might be termed 'intentional ignorance'. How a person reacts to the truth is a willful decision that produces unavoidable consequences in that person't life. If Materialism is embraced, then we invent our own standards of tight and wrong and are accountable to no one for our decisions. If, however, the Bible is right, then there is an absolute standard of right and wrong and we are to be held accountable for not only our decision, but our attitudes and actions as well. In Paul's letter to the Romans he states: For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: (Romans 1:20)

Romans 13: 8 Owe no man any thing, but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law. 9 For this, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou shalt not kill, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet; and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. 10 Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. 11 And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. 12 The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. 13 Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. 14 But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof.

First, the biblical descriptions regarding the coming of Jesus the Jewish Messiah bear many striking resemblances to the coming Antichrist of Islam, whom Muslims refer to as the al-maseeh al-dajjaal (the counterfeit Messiah). Second, the Bible’s Antichrist bears numerous striking commonalities with the primary messiah figure of Islam, who Muslims call the Mahdi. In other words, our Messiah is their antichrist and our Antichrist is their messiah. Even more shocking to many readers was the revelation that Islam teaches that when Jesus returns, He will come back as a Muslim prophet whose primary mission will be to abolish Christianity. It’s difficult for any Bible believer to read of these things without becoming acutely aware of the satanic origins of the Islamic religion. In 2008, I also had the opportunity to coauthor another book on the same subject with Walid Shoebat, a former operative for the Palestine Liberation Organization. This book, entitled God’s War on Terror, is an almost encyclopedic discussion of the role of Islam in the last days, as well as a chronicle of Walid’s journey from a young Palestinian Muslim with a deep hatred for the Jews, to a Christian man who spends his life standing with the Jewish people and proclaiming the truth concerning the dangers of radical Islam. Together these two books have become the cornerstone of what has developed into a popular eschatological revolution. Today, I receive a steady stream of e-mails and reports from individuals expressing how much these books have affected them and transformed their understanding of the end-times. Students, pastors, and even reputable scholars have expressed that they have abandoned the popular notion that the Antichrist, his empire, and his religion will emerge out of Europe or a revived Roman Empire. Instead they have come to recognize the simple fact that the Bible emphatically and repeatedly points us to the Middle East as the launchpad and epicenter of the emerging empire of the Antichrist and his religion. Many testify that although they have been students of Bible prophecy for many years, never before had anything made so much sense, or the prophecies of the Bible become so clear. And even more important, some have even written to share that they’ve become believers or recommitted their lives to Jesus as a result of reading these books. Hallelujah!

arrived in Cambridge, and made an appointment to meet the formidable Krister Stendahl, a Swedish scholar of fierce intelligence, now to be my first adviser. We met in his office. I was nervous, but also amused that this tall and severe man, wearing a black shirt and clerical collar, looked to me like an Ingmar Bergman version of God. After preliminary formalities, he abruptly swiveled in his chair and turned sternly to ask, “So really, why did you come here?” I stumbled over the question, then mumbled something about wanting to find the essence of Christianity. Stendahl stared down at me, silent, then asked, “How do you know it has an essence?” In that instant, I thought, That’s exactly why I came here: to be asked a question like that—challenged to rethink everything. Now I knew I had come to the right place. I’d chosen Harvard because it was a secular university, where I wouldn’t be bombarded with church dogma. Yet I still imagined that if we went back to first-century sources, we might hear what Jesus was saying to his followers when they walked by the Sea of Galilee—we might find the “real Christianity,” when the movement was in its golden age. But Harvard quenched these notions; there would be no simple path to what Krister Stendahl ironically called “play Bible land” simply by digging through history. Yet I also saw that this hope of finding “the real Christianity” had driven countless people—including our Harvard professors—to seek its origins. Naive as our questions were, they were driven by a spiritual quest. We discovered that even the earliest surviving texts had been written decades after Jesus’s death, and that none of them are neutral. They reveal explosive controversy between his followers, who loved him, and outsiders like the Roman senator Tacitus and the Roman court historian Suetonius, who likely despised him. Taken together, what the range of sources does show, contrary to those who imagine that Jesus didn’t exist, is that he did: fictional people don’t have real enemies. What came next was a huge surprise: our professors at Harvard had file cabinets filled with facsimiles of secret gospels I had never heard of—the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, the Gospel of Truth—and dozens of other writings, transcribed by hand from the original Greek into Coptic, and mimeographed in blue letters on pages stamped TOP SECRET. Discovered in 1945, these texts only recently had become available to scholars. This wasn’t what I’d expected to find in graduate school, or even what I wanted—at least, not so long as I still hoped to find answers instead of more questions

Pretty,eh?" I jumped a foot. "Nonna!" She was standing in my doorway, beaming like a demented gnome. "For your underwater dance." "It looks like....a toga." "Toga," she sniffed as she stalked across the room to lift the dress from its hanger, "is for boys at silly parties. This is for a goddess." She held it up to me. "You will be Salacia, Roman goddess of water." It still looked like a toga, and not a very big one, although it did almost reach the floor. My legs would be covered, which was all well and good, except that, other than going a little too long without defuzzing, I didn't have much of a problem with my legs. I did know this wasn't going to work. I just had no idea at the moment how I was going to make it not happen. "This is awfully...pagan of you, Nonna." She rolled her eyes. "Ai, sixteen, with the smart mouth and such certainty. You think I just read the Bible? A goddess, she has more fun than a saint." "Nonna!" "Ah!" She poked me in the center of the chest with her middle finger. "Fun, si, but a bad end if she thinks to hold the heart of a boy who wants only to play. Salacia, she let Neptune chase her and chase her and prove his heart was true." I didn't argue. My grasp of Greco-Roman mythology is shaky at best, and derived mostly from the Percy Jackson books. I had my doubts about Neptune's heart, but figured it would only be smart-assy to mention that to my grandmother.

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

In the end, ethical interpretation of the Bible means to think critically about how our practices of textual engagement might help us to become both more human and more humane. We are constantly crafting and recrafting ourselves, and the goal is to do so in such a way that we contribute, even if only incrementally, more to the good in the world than to the bad. We think of the point made by Tim Beal (2011, 184), who notes that the etymological root of the word “religion” is typically taken to be the Latin religare, from the verb ligare, meaning “to bind” or “to attach” (ergo our word “ligament”). Religion, in this line of thinking, has to do with being bound to certain doctrines, ideas, or practices. But Beal points out that there is another etymology, suggested by the ancient Roman politician and philosopher Cicero, who proposed that religion derives from the Latin relegere, itself a form of the root legere, “to read” (ergo our words “legible” and even “lectionary”). “Re-ligion” becomes then a process of “re-reading,” and the shaping of a religious life (or more broadly a moral life, or more broadly still just a life) is a continual process of engagement with tradition in the context of present realities. We spoke early on in this book about the “traditioning” process that lies behind the biblical text, the way in which earlier texts and traditions are taken up in later contexts in which they are both preserved and transformed. As a result, Scripture itself presents a rich variety of voices, and sometimes one author or text disagrees with the other. It is an ongoing conversation rather than a set of settled doctrines. And it is our privilege to be invited into that conversation, to become ourselves part of the traditioning process, seeking to bring an unfolding understanding of the good into our present reality.

The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.

At the end of this Sabbath encounter with the religious leaders Mark records a remarkable sentence that sums up one of the main themes of the New Testament, “Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.” The Herodians were the supporters of Herod, the nastiest of the corrupt kings who ruled Israel, representing the Roman occupying power and its political system. In any country that the Romans conquered, they set up rulers. And wherever the Romans went, they brought along the culture of Greece—Greek philosophy, the Greek approach to sex and the body, the Greek approach to truth. Conquered societies like Israel felt assaulted by these immoral, cosmopolitan, pagan values. In these countries there were cultural resistance movements; and in Israel that was the Pharisees. They put all their emphasis on living by the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures and putting up big hedges around themselves to prevent contamination by the pagans. See what was going on? The Herodians were moving with the times, while the Pharisees upheld traditional virtues. The Pharisees believed their society was being overwhelmed with pluralism and paganism, and they were calling for a return to traditional moral values. These two groups had been longtime enemies of each other—but now they agree: They have to get rid of Jesus. These two groups were not used to cooperating, but now they do. In fact, the Pharisees, the religious people, take the lead in doing so. That’s why I say this sentence hints at one of the main themes of the New Testament. The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can’t be co-opted by either moralism or relativism. The “traditional values” approach to life is moral conformity—the approach taken by the Pharisees. It is that you must lead a very, very good life. The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery—you have to decide what is right or wrong for you. And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own savior and lord. Both are hostile to the message of Jesus. And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness. The moralist says, “The good people are in and the bad people are out—and of course we’re the good ones.” The self-discovery person says, “Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out—and of course we’re the open-minded ones.” In Western cosmopolitan culture there’s an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness. We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they’re better than other people. We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others. Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does? The gospel does not say, “the good are in and the bad are out,” nor “the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out.” The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out. The gospel says the people who know they’re not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they’re on the right side of the divide are most in danger.

Romans 1: 8 First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world. 9 For God is my witness, whom I serve with my spirit in the gospel of his Son, that without ceasing I make mention of you always in my prayers; 10 Making request, if by any means now at length I might have a prosperous journey by the will of God to come unto you. 11 For I long to see you, that I may impart unto you some spiritual gift, to the end ye may be established; 12 That is, that I may be comforted together with you by the mutual faith both of you and me. 13 Now I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I purposed to come unto you, (but was let hitherto,) that I might have some fruit among you also, even as among other Gentiles. 14 I am debtor both to the Greeks, and to the Barbarians; both to the wise, and to the unwise. 15 So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. 16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. 17 For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23 And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24 Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25 Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are