Biblical history

“ Then I began the Bible, determined in my own mind to know whether God or man was the author. I spent the greater part of two years in reading and comparing scripture with scripture, prophecy with history, and I had not gone half through with the reading of it, before I was perfectly satisfied of its divine origin. No mortal man, or men, could have written with such harmony, wisdom, and truth, without inspiration. The Bible answered all my inquiries, settled all my doubts, established my faith, and gave me hope which has been nearly or quite twenty-seven years an anchor to my soul. ”

“ In the ruts of ancient usage men ride to the meeting-house, seat them in venerable pews, while the holiest associations of time and place calm and pacify their spirit, else often careful and troubled about man things, and all are ready for the teacher of religion to address their deepest and their highest powers. Before him lies the Bible—an Old Testament, full of prophets and rich in psalm and history; a New Testament, crowded wit apostles and martyrs, and in the midst thereof stands that great Hebrew peasant, lifting up such a magnificent and manly face. ”

“ For every page and every word of the Bible, both the New and the Old Testament, is a perfect rule for this earthly life; and every work of the holy catholic fathers teaches us how we may direct our steps to God. ”

“ It reviews Old Testament history, disclosing the stream of God's redeeming purposes flowing down through the older times. It reviews New Testament history, disclosing the broadening and deepening of that purpose for us men and for mankind in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and his Church. ”

“ The amount of our religious knowledge does not depend on our proximity to the days of primitive Christianity. The Bible is the sun of the spiritual firmament; and this divine illuminator, like the glorious orb of day, pours forth its light with equal brilliancy from generation to generation. ”

“ A very able critical defence of the genuineness of the New Testament history, of the truth of the miracles and resurrection of our Lord, his superhuman character and 843divine mission, completes a solid and unanswerable argument for the historical basis of Christianity as a divine and supernatural religion. ”

“ As in nature, so in grace, the most happy discoveries are those which take rise from the certain representations of matters of fact. Natural history is the best philosophy; and so is the sacred history, both of the Old and New Testament, the most proper and grateful vehicle of sacred truth. ”

“ The history of Christ is as surely poetry as it is history. And, in general, only that history is history which might also be fable.
The Bible begins gloriously with Paradise, the symbol of youth, and ends with the everlasting kingdom, with the holy city. The history of every man should be a Bible.
Prayer is to religion what thinking is to philosophy. To pray is to make religion. ”

“ So that the whole history of the world to this day is in truth one continual establishing of the Old Testament revelation: 'O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing that is evil! to him that ordereth his conversation right, shall be shown the salvation of God? ”

“ For the old-time friends of the Bible, the night of darkness and doubt is rapidly passing; the morning of a fuller knowledge and a fuller confidence is at hand. Gone are those agonies of doubt regarding the truthfulness of the Bible's history and the adequacy of its ethics for the needs of our modern world. ”

“ The third theory, which is a modification of the second, is that of essential inspiration, which distinguishes matters of doctrine and conduct as closely related to God’s purpose in the Scriptures from the remaining contents of the Scripture, and claims for the Bible only such inspiration as was necessary to secure accuracy in regard to these. The theology and the morality of the Bible are inspired, but not its history, science, philosophy. ”

“ But those parts of the Bible which have influenced the history of the human race for the better are those chapters of the New Testament which teach us the great moral lessons of love, charity and forgiveness. ”

“ The history, which constitutes our difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible, lies the recorded story of the facts which pressed hard upon the earliest intuition of God, and drove it forward, and compelled it to fix itself, and to define itself, and to take a firmer root, and to make for itself a secure dwelling-place, and to shape for itself a career. ”

“ THAT reading and study are very imperfect which do not bring to all our young people a knowledge of the general contents of the Bible. The Old and New Testaments contain the best moral and religious thought and belief of two important epochs in man's history—the Hebrew and Christian periods. ”

“ The fathers of the early Christian Church, receiving all parts of our sacred books as equally inspired, laid little, if any, less stress on the myths, legends, genealogies, and tribal, family, and personal traditions contained in the Old and the New Testaments, than upon the most powerful appeals, the most instructive apologues, and the most lofty poems of prophets, psalmists, and apostles. ”

“ Christ’s taking flesh, and dying therein for our sins, &c. whether that historical knowledge come to us, either by the sole inward revelation of the holy Spirit, without the medium or mean of Scripture, or also by both, to wit, both by the inward inspiration of the holy Spirit, and by the Scriptures; which two mediums or means, do sometimes concur in producing in men historical knowledge and faith concerning God and Christ, as is said before, but in a different manner. ”

“ The history of modern faith is, to a great extent, the history of Christianity, and the history of Christianity must start from a history of Jesus and his apostles—Paul, Peter, James, John, and Jude, as given in the Epistles and Gospels included in the canon of the New Testament. ”

“ If we examine what is termed the sacred history of the Bible, we shall find that in the various ages of the world, until soon after Christianity was introduced, there was a feeling among men to call upon God and to have their prayers answered—a feeling that if they would approach the Most High and call upon his name in faith, he would answer their supplications and give unto them wisdom, intelligence and revelation for the guidance of their feet in the pathway of life ”

“ A formal appeal to the Bible as the one ground of faith, coupled with an assertion of the right of every instructed man to examine the Bible for himself, threatened the very groundwork of the older dogmatism with ruin. ”

“ It makes discoveries to man on the most momentous subjects, which natural reason never could have made. One of the ancients said, "The Bible is the history of God." It reveals all that is needful to be known of the existence, nature, perfections, relations, mind and will of God. It discloses the whole history of man—opening with his creation, continuing with his present state, and closing with his eternal destiny. ”

“ As it is one of the main characteristics of Christianity itself, that alone of all religions it claims to be founded on historical fact—that its doctrines and precepts, in great measure, have been conveyed to us in the form of history, and that this form has given them a substance, a vitality, a variety, which could, humanly speaking, have been attained in no other way ”

“ The question whether religion can be independent of history is really just the old question whether we need a gospel. The gospel is news that something has happened—something that puts a different face upon life. What that something is is told us in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. ”

“ The Christians, docile and full of faith, have had the good fortune to see the founder of their religion predicted in the clearest manner throughout the whole Old Testament. By dint of allegories, figures, interpretations, and commentaries, their doctors have brought them to see, in this shapeless compilation, all that they had an interest in pointing out to them. ”

“ These are both impregnable positions. The Bible is to a large extent an inspired republication of the spiritual truths which are contained in the physical creation, and in the reason, conscience, and history of man. ”

“ The Bible accords in a wonderful manner with universal history. There is nothing more common in history than the recognition of a God. Sacred and profane history alike involve this principle. The fictions of the poets respecting the different ages of the world coincide with Scripture facts. ”

“ But the fact that the Bible can not be used as the infallible mine of ready-made statements concerning history and morals, will throw him back from the letter to the spirit, from the external proof to the truth which is gained by thought and prayer; while the development of religion described in Scripture, which even now stands forth in clear outline, will be found to be unique in its variety and completeness, and at the same time a type of the development of religion generally. ”

“ These Gospels contain the record of the life and the death of Jesus Christ, that marvelous Personality in whom the histories, the prophecies, the liturgies of the Old Testament are fulfilled, and from whom the growing light and freedom and happiness of eighteen Christian centuries are seen to flow. Most certain it is that the history of the most enlightened lands of earth during these Christian centuries could not be understood without constant reference to the power which came into the world when Jesus Christ was born. ”

“ Several systems of religion essentially the same in character and spirit as that religion now known as Christianity, and setting forth the same doctrines, principles and precepts, and several personages filling a chapter in history almost identical with that of Jesus Christ, it is now known to those who are up with the discoveries and intelligence of the age, were venerated in the East centuries before a religion called Christian, or a personage called Jesus Christ were known to history. ”

“ Christ's spiritual kingdom, and looking to spiritual instead of political events, all the leading occurrences in the history of our religion, from its first promulgation to the present day, already fulfilled, or now in the progress of fulfilment, will be found to be clearly foreshewn in one uninterrupted series of predictions, comprising every verse and every line in these chapters, except a few verses which are still veiled in futurity. ”

“ Of all books, whether rhetoric, logic, vocabulary, poetry, philosophy, history, or whatever be the end, the Bible should be first and most carefully studied, its literary spirit and form should be closely traced and discerned, and its truth should be reverently incorporated into the daily speech, thought and life. ”

“ Happily, though the Ptolemaic astronomy, and witchcraft, and the Genesis creation myths, and the Adam, Noah, Lot, and Jonah legends, and the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, and the prophecies regarding Antichrist, and the early date of the book of Daniel have now been relegated to the limbo of ontworn beliefs, Christianity has but come forth the stronger. ”

“ The diffusion of a critical spirit in history and literature is affecting the criticism of the Bible in our own day in a manner not unlike the burst of intellectual life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.—JOWETT, Essays and Reviews, 346. ”

“ It is true that we do well to emphasize the strictly religious and practical purpose of the Bible; that the Bible is interested in both nature and history so far and only so far as either reveals God and inspires to godly living. It is true that in all Christian thinking Christ is our ultimate appeal. ”

“ It makes Christ's relation to his people both in time and in eternity the ground of an exhaustive inquiry into the mysteries of earthly life, which aims not only to discover God in the trend of history but also to interpret God through history wrought out to its end. ”

“ No other old Testament history, written by the actors in its scenes, tells of miracles. Such stories are found in the traditions written down long after the events narrated, by men who knew nothing of the facts at first hand. ”

“ Whereas the fact is that the gospel was understood and extensively preached in the earliest ages; men retained in their tradition a knowledge of those principles, or parts of them, and however much they may have been distorted, traces of them may still be found in nearly all the mythologies of the world. ”

“ They are independent Bible Studies of very solemn and momentous subjects, but arranged in a continuous and progressive order, showing that the revolving centuries unfold an eternal purpose, and that prophecy was history written in advance, in order, as I said elsewhere, "that in succeeding ages men, by comparing the Divine forecasts in Scripture with the actual condition of things, might learn to know that there is an omniscient God ”

“ He represented the whole history of the Old Testament as a mirror, which held forth an accurate view of the transactions and events that were to happen in the church under the dispensation of the New Testament, and unto the end of the world. ”

“ Two causes are obviously assignable for Christianity in all its essential features and phases, being so strikingly similar to the ancient pagan systems which preceded it, as also the close analogies of all the principal systems, whose doctrines and practical teachings have found a place on the pages of history. ”

“ We have seen in the Old Testament the literature of the people of religion, commissioned with its normal evolution; writings charged with deep religiousness; the records of the various moods and tenses through which religion grew continuously and insistently toward perfection, in an organic process watched and directed by a Higher Power than man. We have seen in the New Testament the record of the realization of this long-sought aim of the people of religion ”

“ Now, as we say that the truth and grandeur of the Old Testament most comes out experimentally,—that is, by the whole course of the world establishing it, and confuting what is opposed to it—so it is with Christianity. Its grandeur and truth are far best brought out experimentally ”