Stephen Sorensen > Stephen's Quotes

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.”
― Jonathan Swift

“The recognition type-scene belonged to the storyteller's standard repertory in ancient Greco-Roman narrative and drama, especially in epic, novel, tragedy, and comedy, where motifs of hidden identities, veiling and revealing, Sein and Schein, deception and discovery often played a central role in the plot.”
― Kasper Bro Larsen, Recognizing the Stranger: Recognition Scenes in the Gospel of John

“The gods are given even greater license to lie and deceive. Apparently, they do not have the same degree of responsibility to their relatives and allies as humans do. Effective acts of lying and deception seem to be admired as tokens of one god's at least temporary ascendancy over another god.”
― Louise H. Pratt, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics

“The view that Jesus is a deceiver (v. 12) may have deep roots (cf. 7:47; Luke 23:2; see Martyn 1979, 64-81: “beguiler”).”
― D. Moody Smith, John

“Early Christian thinkers frequently employed the "deception of the devil" motif to explain God's activity in the defeat of evil. ...God fooled Satan into thinking Jesus was just another human being...”
― Darby Kathleen Ray, Deceiving the Devil: Atonement, Abuse, and Ransom

“Self-deception is cured by the gospel...”
― Dan O. Via, Self-Deception and Wholeness in Paul and Matthew

“It is not only heretical Christians who interpret Jesus' crucifixion as divine deception.”
― Austin Busch, Risen Indeed? Resurrection and Doubt in the Gospel of Mark

“Odysseus’ success depends as much on making people believe what is not true as on surprising them with the truth.”
― Sheila Murnaghan, Disguise and Recognition in the Odyssey

“There is a difference between being merely irrational and being self-deceptive, and one of the major problems of self-deception is to rigorously distinguish between the two.”
― Eric Funkhouser, Self-Deception

“In the Mediterranean world, deception is a legitimate strategy at the service of honor; it is a means value. Those who excel in deception are cheered by the crowd, even as those they have "taken in" smart from the shame and plot retaliation.”
― John J. Pilch

“Despite biblical prohibitions against lying, the Bible rarely offers an evaluation of its characters or their conduct, thus leaving the moral ambiguity regarding the Bible’s attitude towards the ethical nature of deception open to interpretation by the reader.”
― Shira Weiss, Ethical Ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible: Philosophical Analysis of Scriptural Narrative

“...the OT never categorically prohibits deception, but only deception that brings unjust harm or disadvantage to another person.”
― Matthew Newkirk, Just Deceivers: An Exploration of the Motif of Deception in the Books of Samuel

“For trickster saves the world. The paradoxical trickster-creating order through chaos, the underdog that overcomes, the liminal role, and all the dangers associated with it, personified Israel. So in Exile when the canon is beginning to form, the Israelites tell of their ancestors as tricksters. For the trickster represents not only the threat of a marginalized existence, or the danger of the liminal status, but also the salvific role in which Israel still paradoxically believed it functioned.”
― Dean Andrew Nicholas, The Trickster Revisited: Deception as a Motif in the Pentateuch