Top 44 Bible As Literature Quotes
#1. I wasn't reading it [the Bible] as literature. I was reading it as literature, and as history, and as a moral guide, and as anthropology and law and culture.
David Plotz
#2. One of the first courses I ever taught at Dartmouth was on the Bible as literature.
Jay Parini
#3. It is impossible to look into the Bible with the most ordinary attention without feeling that we have got into a moral atmosphere quite different from that which we breathe in the world, and in the world's literature.
Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine
#4. On the Day of Judgment , life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law
John Bunyan
#5. It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race.
Lafcadio Hearn
#6. For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.
Lafcadio Hearn
#7. A perverse nature can be stimulated by anything. Any book can be used as a pornographic instrument, even a great work of literature if the mind that so uses it is off-balance. I once found a small boy masturbating in the presence of the Victorian steel-engraving in a family Bible.
Anthony Burgess
#8. The Bible is not just one book, but an entire library, with stories, songs, poetry, letters and history, as well as literature that might more obviously qualify as 'religious.'
John Drane
#9. In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, 'But the Bible is just a book.' Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books. But they all are too ironic, by half. A book is the Bible.
Gerald Weaver
#10. The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#11. You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
#12. Those who read the Scriptures as magnificent literature, breath-taking poetry, or history and overlook the story of salvation miss the Bible's real meaning and message.
Billy Graham
#13. It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.
Richard Gist
#14. The history of the Bible text is a romance of literature, though it is a romance of which the consequences are of vital import; and thanks to the succession of discoveries which have been made of late years, we know more about it than of the history of any other ancient book in the world.
Frederic G. Kenyon
#15. Scholars of the Hebrew bible define something they call wisdom literature and I would say clearly the poetry of wisdom is something that comes with age or that might come with age which has to do with reflecting on experience.
Edward Hirsch
#16. I'm a reader and a storyteller, and God chose literature and story and poetry as the languages of my spiritual text. To me, the Bible is a manifesto, a guide, a love letter, a story.
Shauna Niequist
#17. English literature is a glorious inheritance which is open to all - there are no barriers, no coupons, and no restrictions. In the English language and in its great writers there are great riches and treasures, of which, of course, the Bible and Shakespeare stand along on the highest platform.
Winston Churchill
#18. The total absence of humor from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.
Alfred North Whitehead
#20. I have quite a few different Bibles. Having rejected my parents' religion, I still think the King James Bible is the most important work of literature in English. None of us can help being influenced by it.
Ken Follett
#21. Different authors have different points of view. You can't just say, 'I believe in the Bible.
Bart D. Ehrman
#22. My mother's influence in molding my character was conspicuous. She forced me to learn daily long chapters of the Bible by heart. To that discipline and patient, accurate resolve I owe not only much of my general power of taking pains, but of the best part of my taste for literature.
John Ruskin
#23. The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions, and studied by millions. It remains the most published and most read book in the world of literature.
Bernard Ramm
#24. If one discards the Bible as being unreliable, then he must discard almost all literature of antiquity.
Josh McDowell
#25. You Christians look after a document containing enough dynamite to blow all civilisation to pieces, turn the world upside down and bring peace to a battle-torn planet. But you treat it as though it is nothing more than a piece of literature.
Mahatma Gandhi
#26. I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: the most conscientious student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.
Northrop Frye
#27. Here, you can walk into a bookstore and pick up a Bible or Christian literature and learn. Over there, they are lucky if they have one Bible for a whole village.
Michael Scott
#29. Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#30. Give yourself to reading.' ... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works,
especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#31. To know that the Bible is the literature of a barbarous people, to know that it is uninspired, to be certain that the supernatural does not and cannot exist - all this is but the beginning of wisdom.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#32. There are two methods for the literary study of any book - the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.
Lafcadio Hearn
#33. There is a quiet revolution going on in the study of the Bible. At its center is a growing awareness that the Bible is a work of literature and that the methods of literary scholarship are a necessary part of any complete study of the Bible.
Leland Ryken
#34. The Hebrew Bible is the supreme example of that rarest of phenomena, a national literature of self-criticism. Other ancient civilisations recorded their victories. The Israelites recorded their failures. It is what the Mosaic and prophetic books are about.
Jonathan Sacks
#35. Every generation looks at literature through the lens of their own experience, but with the Bible, everyone gets apprehensive and thinks it'll be too stuffy.
Walter Kirn
#36. The Bible stands alone in human literature in its elevated conception of manhood, in character and conduct.
Henry Ward Beecher
#37. If you want to consume the cream of Christ's philosophy, then don't read the Bible, read Tolstoy.
Abhijit Naskar
#38. Just because I've extricated myself from religion doesn't mean I'm not interested in the scriptures. I look at the Bible as itself. It's a holy book, it has incredible literature in it and beautiful poetry.
Patti Smith
#39. All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.
Allan Bloom
#40. The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.
Hugh Blair
#41. The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.
Richard Dawkins
#42. The Bible towers in content above all earlier religious literature; and it towers just as impressively over all subsequent literature in the direct simplicity of its message and ... its appeal to men of all lands and times.
William F. Albright
#43. God produced great writing, a matter of first importance to a man like Lincoln, ever impressed with the nature of cause and forces.
Richard Brookhiser
#44. The book of the Psalms, which is the primary devotional literature of the whole Bible, is full of complaints.
David Augsburger
