…A dialogue between Bible-lovers, Bible-haters, and everyone in-between…
“It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people. The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.” ——Horace Greeley
“When the missionaries came to Africa 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.” ——Bishop Desmond Tutu
“We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.” ——Charles Kingsley
“The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.” ——Elizabeth Cady Stanton
“The Bible itself is intolerant, and true followers of God’s word should be as well.” ——Bob Jones III
“Too often we see the Bible through whatever lens we get from our culture.” ——Brian McLaren
“He who perverts Scripture is not the man who reduces this sacred poetry to its true meaning. Nay, that man perverts the Bible who hardens into dogmas the glowing metaphors of Eastern poetry.” ——Thomas Allin
“Any number of people assume that the Bible says that Eve ate an apple, or that Jonah was swallowed by a whale. Yet the Bible never says a word about whales or apples. In the former case it refers to a fish, which might imply any sort of sea-monster; and in the second, to the essential experience of fruition, or tasting the fruit of the tree, which is obviously more general and even more mystical… The things that look silly now are the first rationalistic explanations rather than the first religious or primitive outlines. If those original images had been left in their own natural mystery of dark fruition or dim monsters of the deep, nobody would have quarrelled with them half so much… But it is unfair to turn round and blame the Bible because of all these legends and jokes and journalistic allusions, which are read into the Bible by people who have not read the Bible.” ——G.K. Chesterton
“Just because the Bible says something doesn’t make it truth if what you are saying from the Bible is slanted, distorted, mis-applied, or merely the letter of the word.” ——J. Preston Eby
“One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.” ——James I. Packer
“The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired is that it has stood so much bad preaching.” ——A.T. Robertson
“The devil can quote Scriptures and so can his ministers and they can quote them in perfect King James English.” ——Gary Amirault
“We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.” ——C.S. Lewis
“Spouting scripture has no magic to dispel the devil. Scripture has phenomenal power but unless you submit your mind to its inerrant truth, its power is largely lost to you.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“The one thing the New Testament forbids us to do is to treat it as a static document to be used as a set of proof-texts for instant solutions to complex and controversial contemporary problems. To misuse the New Testament in this way is to deny its dynamic character and to fail to realize that the Word has to be applied in a specific context. A static interpretation of the New Testament is dependent on a frozen Christology.” ——Karl Paul Donfried
“The Christian community continues to exist because the conclusions of the critical study of the Bible are largely withheld from them.” ——Hans Conzelmann
“The inspiration of the Bible depends upon the ignorance of the gentleman who reads it.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“Both read the Bible day and night; but you read black where I read white.” ——William Blake
“When you are reading a book in a dark room, and come to a difficult part, you take it to a window to get more light. So take your Bibles to Christ.” ——Robert Murray M’Cheyne
“The Bible rose to the place it now occupies because it deserved to rise to that place, and not because God sent anybody with a box of tricks to prove its divine authority.” ——Bruce Barton
“There are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history.” ——Sir Isaac Newton
“The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” ——Samuel Butler
“More than 400 errors in the first edition of the King James Bible were corrected in a subsequent edition two years later.” ——Neil Lightfoot
“That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.” ——Thomas Paine
“We are all literalists, we are all doubters. It just depends on which part of the Bible we happen to be focusing our attention.” ——Michael Phillips
“The Bible is no mere book, but a Living Creature, with a power that conquers all that oppose it.” ——Napoleon
“The observant man recognizes many mysteries into which he can not pretend to see, and he remembers that the world is too wide for the eye of one man. But the modern sophists are sure of everything, especially if it contradicts the Bible.” ——Charles Haddon Spurgeon
“The Bible is a collection of fantastic legends without scientific support.” ——The Communist Dictionary issued by the Soviet State Publishing
“I am going to put the Bible out of business.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“Another century and there will not be a Bible on earth!” ——Voltaire
“Voltaire expected that within fifty years of his lifetime there would not be one Bible in the world. His house is now a distribution center for Bibles in many languages.” ——Corrie Ten Boom
“Were we allowed to read the Bible as we do all other books, we would admire its beauties, treasure its worthy thoughts, and account for all its absurd, grotesque and cruel things, by saying that its authors lived in rude, barbaric times. But we are told that it was written by inspired men; that it contains the will of God; that it is perfect, pure, and true in all its parts; the source and standard of all moral and religious truth; that it is the star and anchor of all human hope; the only guide for man, the only torch in Nature’s night. These claims are so at variance with every known recorded fact, so palpably absurd, that every free, unbiased soul is forced to raise the standard of revolt.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“The Catholics have a Pope. Protestants laugh at them, and yet the Pope is capable of intellectual advancement. In addition to this, the Pope is mortal, and the church cannot be afflicted with the same idiot forever. The Protestants have a book for their Pope. The book cannot advance. Year after year, and century after century, the book remains as ignorant as ever.” ——Robert Ingersoll
“The foibles, inconsistencies and humanness of the Bible all the more show us that the letter of the Scripture is not to be enthroned as an idol to be worshipped of itself. The letter will always kill. It is the spirit which God has breathed into his holy instrument, the spirit of his high Logos, this Word, that transmits its life to all those who obey it.” ——Michael Phillips
“The value of the Old Testament may be dependent on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way — to find the Word in it… to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works.” ——C.S. Lewis
“Instead of believing therefore that because the Scripture is human and has grown with men, and has marks of our weakness and death and shame upon it, therefore it must perish and see corruption, I believe that it can never perish or see corruption. I see it is human; I see that it has grown; I see it can be judged and wounded. I believe too that it has in its composition exactly so much of perishableness as Christ’s flesh had when He walked here with His apostles. But it is like Christ’s body, the peculiar tabernacle of God’s truth. And those who walk by it day and night know this, for they have seen, as all shall one day see, it transfigured.” ——Andrew Jukes
“The Bible reveals God’s adaptability, as it were, to take the human drama and bring to life from it a flawed document, with its mistakes and lost endings and errant genealogies, and then raise that document and elevate it to His use by imbuing it with spiritual power that transcends the level of humanity altogether.” ——Michael Phillips
“There is an old Italian proverb about the nature of translation: ‘Traddutore, traditore!’ This means simply, ‘Translators — traitors!’ Of course, as you can see, something is lost in the translation of this pithy expression: there is great similarity in both the spelling and the pronunciation of the original saying, but these get diluted once they are put in English dress. Even the translation of this proverb illustrates its truth!” ——Dr. Daniel Wallace
“We do not deny, nay we affirm and avow, that the very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set forth by men of our profession, containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God: as the King’s speech which he uttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latin, is still the King’s speech, though it not be interpreted by every translator with the like grace nor peradventure so fitly for phrase, nor so expressly for sense, everywhere.” ——From the translators’ introduction to the original 1611 King James Bible
“He who reads the Bible in translation is like a man who kisses his bride through a veil.” ——Hayyim Nachman Bialik
“Still, when a veil there must be, the translator’s task is to make it as gossamer-fine a veil as may be. Indeed, the face of even the most beautiful of women may be enhanced by a veil, if only the veil be worthy of her beauty.” ——MacGregor
“Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated.” ——C.S. Lewis
“There are no Bibles which do not contain errors. But don’t let that scare you. You see, if our Father would have provided a perfectly written English translation for you, you probably would spend even less time in prayer and communion and study than you do now.” ——Gary Amirault
“To preach the Bible as ‘the handbook for life,’ or as the answer to every question, rather than as the revelation of Christ, is to turn the Bible into an entirely different book. This is how the Pharisees approached Scripture, as we can see clearly from the questions they asked Jesus. For the Pharisees, the Scriptures were a source of trivia for life’s dilemmas.” ——Michael Horton
“We must stop using the Bible as though it were a potpourri of inerrant proof-texts by which we can bring people into bondage to our religious traditions. We must no longer use the Bible as the Pharisees used the Torah when they gave it absolute and final status. Christian biblicism is no different from Jewish legalism. It is the old way of the letter, not the new way of the Spirit.” ——Robert D. Brinsmead
“One of the dangers from which the Church should pray to be delivered is idolatry of the letter of Scripture. The letter exists for the spirit, not the spirit for the letter. Literalism is the grave in which spiritual religion is buried. The New Testament is a book which is to be spiritually interpreted.” ——James M. Campbell
“If we move in the direction of biblical absolutism (‘the religion of the Book’), how can we escape turning the New Testament into a Christian Torah and the gospel into a new law? Once we do that, religious fascism with all its sectarian ugliness cannot be far away. Far better a mistaken Christian (a heretic) who has somehow caught the Spirit of Christ, than an orthodox Protestant who thinks that the Spirit is mediated to him through the letter of correct theology.” ——Robert D. Brinsmead
“We are not to make the Torah into God Himself, nor the Bible into a ‘paper pope.’ The Bible is only the result of the Word of God. We can experience the return of the Word of God in the here and now, the perpetual return of the actual, living, indisputable Word of God that makes possible the act of witnessing, but we should never think of the Bible as any sort of talisman or oracle constantly at our disposal that we need only open and read to be in relation to the Word of God and God Himself.” ——Jacques Ellul
“The Bible in itself is not the Word of God. The Word of God is a person (John 1:1). Neither does the Bible have life, power or light in itself any more than did the Jewish Torah. These attributes may be ascribed to the Bible only by virtue of its relationship to Him who is Word, Life, Power and Light. Life is not in the book, as the Pharisees supposed, but only in the Man of the book (John 5:39).” ——Robert Brinsmead
“The Bible is a wonderful book. It is the truth about the Truth. It is not the Truth. A sermon taken from the Bible can be a wonderful thing to hear. It is the truth about the truth about the truth. But it is not the truth. There have been many books written about the things contained in the Bible. I have written some myself. They can be quite wonderful to read. They are the truth about the truth about truth about the Truth. But they are NOT the Truth. Only Jesus Christ is the Truth. Sometimes the Truth can be drowned in a multitude of words.” ——Richard Wurmbrand
“The New Testament authors did not customarily refer to their written record as the Word of God. That subsequent Christian tradition tends to do this while the writers themselves hesitate to do it should tell us something. Evidently they distinguished the difference between the living, infinite Word and the written record more clearly than we do. If the written record is ever called the Word, it is the Word only in a secondary, derivative or relational sense. It is not the Word in the absolute sense. Strictly speaking, the Scripture is the witness to the Word of God, and like a good witness, it does not speak of itself but points away from itself.” ——Robert D. Brinsmead
“The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not ‘the Word of God’ in the sense that every passage in itself gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God.” ——C.S. Lewis
“Perhaps a way of illustrating the purpose of the law would be to liken the law to the chaff of grain or the shell of a nut. Christ is the True Meat which was to come at an appointed time in history. The Mosaic law protected, preserved, the central message of a redeemer of mankind who would come in the fullness of time. Chaff or shells act as preservers until the seed inside is ready to be eaten or until planting time. When it is time to eat the seed in the nut, we break off the shell! It has served its purpose.” ——Gary Amirault
“The Bible is the written word of God, and because it is written it is confined and limited by the necessities of ink and paper and leather. The Voice of God, however, is alive and free as the sovereign God is free. ‘The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.’ The life is in the speaking words. God’s word in the Bible can have power only because it corresponds to God’s Word in the universe. It is the present Voice which makes the written word powerful. Otherwise it would lie locked in slumber within the covers of a book.” ——A.W. Tozer
“If you don’t live by a Voice you will fashion a god in your own image. You will take His Word and dissect it, to make it speak what you want it to say.” ——John Enslow
“Shift from your mind conquering the Bible, down into surrender to the Spirit of God who will whisper to you what He meant by what He wrote.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“The whole meaning of spiritual understanding is that we see what the Spirit has always meant. It is one of our laws of interpretation that the whole Bible is focused in Christ, and that the work of the Holy Spirit in every dispensation relates to Christ.” ——T. Austin-Sparks
“Christ is the Word of God. It is not in certain texts written in the New Testament, valuable as they are; it is not in certain words which Jesus spoke, vast as is their preciousness; it is in the Word, which Jesus is, that the great manifestation of God is made.” ——Phillips Brooks
“The Word of God is a Person. When you read it, do you see words or do you see Him?” ——Jacquelyn K. Heasley
“To understand the Book in real perception, it’s necessary to know the Author before you read His Book. To truly KNOW Jesus as He is, we MUST know Him in experience.” ——Martha Kilpatrick
“Knowing the Word of God does not necessarily mean that we know the God of the Word.” ——Chip Brogden
“What we really need, after all, is not to defend the Bible but to understand it.” ——Millar Burrows
“The longer you read the Bible, the more you will like it; it will grow sweeter and sweeter; and the more you get into the spirit of it, the more you will get into the spirit of Christ.” ——Romaine
“The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.” ——A.W. Tozer
“One way the God-Man reveals Himself to us, of all ways, is not in a glorious vision or supernatural event, but in the pages of this thing we call the Bible. Imagine that. How odd. A book. Why not just appear to the one who seeks Him and speak face to face. No! Why? It would kill us. It would absolutely blow us away to be confronted with the Real Jesus, because the Jesus we have come to believe in is a fairy tale, a jolly elf, a fantasy character. The Bible prepares us for Him, does it not? Using types, shadows, stories, just to whet your appetite and get you accustomed to Him and His dealings so you are not totally shocked when you do meet Him.” ——Chip Brogden
“The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just because it tells me the story of Jesus.” ——George MacDonald