#testament

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

Like the Hindu in Belfast who was asked whether he was a Catholic Hindu or a Protestant Hindu, those of us who follow this fresh reading of the New Testament want to say to our critics right and left, ‘Don’t imagine that because we don’t check all your fundamentalist boxes, we must be modernists, or that because we don’t check all your modernist boxes, we must be fundamentalists. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#modernists #new-testament #sbl #imagination

The Epistles in the New Testament have all of them a particular reference to the condition and usages of the Christian world at the time they were written. ↗

— Joseph Butler

#christian world #condition #epistles #new #new testament

The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, said an eminent scholar, have God for their Author, the Salvation of mankind for their end, and Truth without any mixture of error for their matter. ↗

— Adam Clarke

#author #eminent #end #error #god

We are already experiencing the symptoms of climate change, especially with a hotter and drier climate in southern Australia - the rush to construct desalination plants is an expensive testament to that. ↗

— Malcolm Turnbull

#australia #change #climate #climate change #construct

If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would follow strictly the teachings of the New, he would be insane. ↗

— Robert Green Ingersoll

#follow #insane #man #new #old

Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New. ↗

— Francis Bacon

#blessing #new #old #old testament #prosperity

Yet, if the world were bettered by My death or story left untold, I would condemn myself to die For misdemeanours manifold: I bring no harm to young or old Alive or dead, in either case: A man so needy never rolled A mountain from its resting place. ↗

— François Villon

#death

The New Testament witnesses were fully aware of the background against which the resurrection took place. ↗

— Josh McDowell

#aware #background #fully #new #new testament

Is it not a species of blasphemy to call the New Testament revealed religion, when we see in it such contradictions and absurdities. ↗

— Thomas Paine

#call #contradictions #new #new testament #religion