Frank Moore Cross Quotes

We are thrown back on the text, for the most part. Archaeology can give us background. It doesn't either confirm or disprove the Bible, but it may illuminate it.

My own interest is far more in the Hebrew Bible. My religion is more personally related to the Hebrew Bible than it is to the New Testament.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.

I guess what this is reflecting is my own search for answers that I can't find. Frank [Moore Cross] and I have examined a lot of archaeological materials in the hope of finding out.

It has been said that in order to pursue the history of Biblical interpretation, you must include the whole philosophy of the West, which informs it at every stage.

I have a concordance to the Talmud at home, which I have to use.

I grew up in a household in which the Bible played very little role.

My father was a Social Gospel, far-left liberal, and to some degree a mystic. But we did not have Bible readings; we had prayers.

My father's religious life was not Biblically centered. He was a saintly man, whom I could never emulate, so I went into scholarship rather than into the kind of pastoral activity that he pursued.

I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student.

Happily, I come out of a Calvinist tradition in which the Hebrew Bible carries as much authority as the New Testament. No different weight is given to one or the other.

The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition.

I find myself a little uncomfortable in the New Testament environment. And this is also true of what I would call late Judaism, the Judaism of the Second Temple and later.

You have miracles [in the Hebrew Bible], yes, but they're not the work, normally, of demons.

[The story of Adam and Eve] it's poetry. One must interpret it as poetry. The first 11 chapters of Genesis [the Primeval History] are absolutely remarkable.

The Hebrew Bible defines Judaism. It's certainly true that the Talmudic interpretations become authoritative and normative, but they are interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. So that is always there.

What is public for you, Elie [Wiesel], is private for Frank [Moore Cross], and the reverse.

I would not speak of Judaism as a Talmudic or Rabbinic religion. It's a Biblical religion.

If I ever write a book on "How True Is the Bible?" I'll have to start out by saying that archaeology is not the way to find out; that it has very little to say.

I try to look at the texts and say: Is there a way that I can find history in the texts and separate it from what may be the mythological elements, and I don't find any rules for that.

The text says Deuteronomy was lost, but you say it was written then.

Frank [Moore Cross], publicly dissects the text but he has a private, passionate relationship to the text that he doesn't often speak of publicly.

I sense that what you two [Elie Wiesel and Frank Moore Cross] share is that you each have a public relationship to the Biblical text and a somewhat private relationship to the Biblical text.

Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.

There are surely many legitimate approaches to Biblical literature, and I think that it depends very much on one's experience and temperament which way one deals primarily with Biblical material.

With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.

There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.

We want to live in ambiguity. This is the human condition.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

I prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naiveté, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naiveté.

Israel defined its God and its relation to that God in existential, relational terms. They did not, until quite late, approach the question of one God in an abstract philosophical way.

If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That's the Tower of Babel.