The imaginations of believers have dressed up and exaggerated the excellence of the style and matter of the New Testament generally, in the same manner, in which they have the moral instructions of Jesus.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The places chosen for the administration of the ordinance, and the circumstances attending those instances, in which the act of baptizing is particularly described in the New Testament, plainly indicate immersion.
Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
When you read the New Testament, you see the Holy Spirit was supposed to change everything so that this gathering of people who call themselves Christians had this supernatural element about them.
If men were but to read the New Testament with the same tone and emphasis, with which they do other books, and were to keep out of mind the idea of its being sacred, they would be disgusted with the credulity, and the want of intellect, reason and judgment, that is apparent in it.
Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.
Religion may become a fashion as well as anything else; and, when it does become so, it has as little to do, in those who thus hold it, with the heart and the character as any other fashion.
A Christian is the highest style of man.
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
One of my pet peeves about biblical epics was that the characters' costumes always looked like they're just out of the dry cleaners.
If only Jesus' followers shared his personality. That one shift alone would correct so many of the ridiculous and horrifying things that pass for popular Christianity.