Biblical Scholar Quotes & Sayings

I am a scholar of religions with four degrees, including one in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek, who has been studying the origins of Christianity for two decades, who also happens to be Muslim. — Reza Aslan

False Narrative: The Kingdom of God is Future No serious biblical scholar would deny that Jesus' proclaimed the kingdom of God. However, many scholars conclude that Jesus was not talking about our present world but rather an epoch in history that has not yet begun. — James Bryan Smith

Over the years my mom has become a self-taught Biblical scholar. — Kathie Lee Gifford

No scientist ever begins his work de novo; while he works with the methodological questioning of what he has already known he builds on knowledge already achieved and engages in a movement of advance. But it is one of the worst characteristics of theological study, whether in biblical interpretation or in dogmatic formulation, that every scholar nowadays thinks he must start all over again, and too many give the impression that no one ever understood this or that until they came along. — T.F. Torrance

But you can't fault me on my footnotes. I've worked hard on them and they look pretty impressive. And almost all the sources I quote actually exist. I must confess, however, that the idea of putting footnotes in chapter 5, the autobiographical chapter, started out simply as a joke. Who but a biblical scholar would think of footnoting an autobiography? But the joke quickly got out of hand and become a significant part of that chapter. I plan someday to write a scholarly article consisting of a single sentence and a twenty-page footnote. — Jeffrey L. Staley

The American biblical scholar Bart Ehrman, in a book whose subtitle is The Story Behind Who Changed the New Testament and Why, unfolds the huge uncertainty befogging the New Testament texts. — Richard Dawkins

In my qualified opinion as a Biblical scholar, there is 'massive' and overwhelming historical evidence that the New Testament manuscripts are in fact reliable."


~R. Alan Woods [2013] — R. Alan Woods

Your illustrations are really good." "You've mastered another world than I. — Robert H. Eisenman

the biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman notes that "probably the most remarkable difference of all" in disparate passages "is their different ways of picturing God." Some depict "a deity who can regret things that he has done ([Gen.] 6:6, 7), . . . a deity who can be 'grieved to his heart' (6:6). . . . This anthropomorphic quality . . . is virtually entirely lacking in other passages. — Terryl L. Givens

I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than anything else in the English language - and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music. — Hunter S. Thompson

Anybody who has read any biblical scholarship knows that every scholar struggles over completely intractable problems with the original texts, or what they have to work from. It's one of the great, powerful, mysterious objects that have come down through history. This does not translate into literal interpretation for me. — Marilynne Robinson

I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this. — Bart D. Ehrman