{"author":"Timothy Beal","author_id":"Timothy+Beal","total_quotes":16,"quotes":[{"text":"In many ways, those dedicated to removing all potential biblical contradictions, to making the Bible entirely consistent with itself, are no different from irreligious debunkers of the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general. Many from both camps seem to believe that simply demonstrating that the Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions, as I have just done, is enough to discredit any religious tradition that embraces it as Scripture. Bible debunkers and Bible defenders are kindred spirits.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["beliefs","bible"],"id":2258,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"For many potential Bible readers, this expectation that the Bible is univocal is paralyzing. You notice what seem to be contradictions or tensions between different voices in the text. You can't find an obvious way to reconcile them. You figure that it must be your problem. You don't know how to read it correctly, or you're missing something. You're not holy enough to read the Holy Bible. It might even be sacrilege for you to try. If the Bible is God's perfect infallible Word, then any misunderstanding or ambiguity must be the result of our own depravity. That is, our sinful nature as fallen creatures is what separates us from God, and therefore from God’s Word. So you either give up or let someone holier than thou tell you 'what it really says.' I think that's tragic. You're letting someone else impoverish it for you, when in fact you have just brushed up against the rich polyvocality of biblical literature.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","expectations","tragedy"],"id":7869,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"We're used to picturing the genealogy of a text like a family tree: one original at the base ascending like a single trunk, with copies branching off it, and copies of copies branching off them. And so on throughout the generations. We imagine an original from which all the generations of diversity spring as scribes make revisions and introduce copying errors. But the reverse seems to be the case when it comes to the origins of the Bible: the further you go back in its literary history, the less uniformity there is. Scriptural traditions are rooted, quite literally, in diversity.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","origin"],"id":28247,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"The Bible appears to be the most revered book never read.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","irony"],"id":49398,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"About two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible 'answers all or most of the basic questions of life'—and 28 percent of them admit that they rarely or never read it!","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","irony","literacy"],"id":56281,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"Indeed, like so many encounters with Jesus in the Gospel stories, we might go to the Bible looking for answers, but we usually come away with more questions.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","jesus","questions"],"id":99626,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"The Bible is not a book of answers but a library of questions.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","questions-and-answers"],"id":105091,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"To be sure, all translation is interpretation. ... Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it's not.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["bible","overreaching","translation"],"id":165873,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"Here and throughout the Gospels, Jesus does not simply cite Scripture as though it were a self-evident, self-interpreting source of authority. He rereads it, drawing out new, often highly provocative meanings, 'fulfilling' it in a way that gives it new form for a new day. What would Jesus do? Reread. The Bible tells me so.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["jesus","scripture","tradition"],"id":204186,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"},{"text":"Like my peers, I believed that the Bible was God's Word written down for me, answering all my questions about who God is and what God wants for my life, from the mundane to the ultimate. Or at least I knew that was what I needed to believe. But that was not what I found when I actually opened the Bible up and looked around inside.","author":"Timothy Beal","tags":["beliefs","bible"],"id":242063,"author_id":"Timothy+Beal"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":16,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}