The Bible Unfiltered Quotes

“But you must remember that, while the Bible was written for us, it wasn’t written to us.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“The people God chose to write about the fact that he created everything were not writing science because they couldn’t—and God, of course, knew that. Instead of pressing Genesis into a debate with Darwin or making it cryptically convey the truths of quantum physics, we should let it be what it is so it can accomplish the goals for which God inspired it—to assert the fact of a Creator and our accountability to him.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“Those parallels demonstrate with no uncertainty that this biblical passage was specifically written to denigrate Mesopotamian ideas of the superiority of their gods and culture.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“The point of these passages isn’t that God was killing literal dinosaurs to transform the formless and empty world at creation. Rather, it was a polemic strategy to assert that Yahweh—not Baal or any other deity in the ancient world—was the Lord of creation and Most High God.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“The point I’m making here is that Leviathan and other “dinosaurs” are well-known mythological figures from uninspired texts outside the Bible contemporary with the biblical world.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“While the drama of the biblical epic ultimately leads to Jesus, he isn’t the ultimate focal point of every passage. That’s homiletical flair, not the reality of the text.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“Imagination isn’t a sound hermeneutic.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“It might sound odd, but we’re actually in a better position than any of our spiritual forefathers in that respect. We live at a time when the languages of the major civilizations that flourished during the lifetimes of the biblical writers have been deciphered.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“Creeds are useful for distilling important points of theology. But they are far from the whole counsel of God, and even farther from the biblical world.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“the proper context for interpreting the Bible is the context of the biblical writers—the context that produced the Bible. Every other context is alien or at least secondary.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms

“As Christians, whether consciously or otherwise, we’ve been trained to think that the history of Christianity is the true context for interpreting the Bible. It isn’t. That might be hard to hear, but Christian history and Christian thought is not the context of the biblical writers, and so it cannot be the correct context for interpreting what they wrote.”
― Michael S. Heiser, The Bible Unfiltered: Approaching Scripture on Its Own Terms