Frank Moore Cross Quotes
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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.
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You have miracles [in the Hebrew Bible], yes, but they're not the work, normally, of demons.
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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.
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The text says Deuteronomy was lost, but you say it was written then.
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Certainly professionally, yes [I was interested more in history]. And literary criticism, the structure of poetry. But it is primarily as a historian that I work, although text criticism and literary criticism are very much a part of my interests.
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I became intimately acquainted with the Bible only as a theological student.
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Elie [Wiesel], when you ask, "Why do I want to know," I'm trying to grab the holy. And I'm getting thrown back.
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I find it exciting to get any historical material from the ground. As you know, I love to put ancient Israel and its literature into their ancient contexts. And to rebuild - that is, to me, a very exciting historical task.
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The history of interpretation [of the Bible] is fascinating; but that is something else.
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That is to say, the inspiration, the interpretive richness of the text is what Elie [Wiesel] does publicly, and his interest in history is his private reserve; he knows that he is not an expert in dissecting the text the way Frank [Moore Cross] does.
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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.
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I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?
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With the Hebrew Bible, you're living in an austere world.
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I grew up in a household in which the Bible played very little role.
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When you come to the New Testament you can't even swing a cat without hitting three demons and two spirits. And magic becomes something that is everywhere. In the Hebrew Bible this sort of thing doesn't go on.
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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.
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[Sacrifice of Isaac] is a major theme of the so-called Elohist [one authorial strand in the Pentateuch]. It is marked by all of his linguistic characteristics, and so on. We cannot determine what is historical and what isn't. As literary critics, we would understand the importance of this for understanding life, destiny. But the historical question must be left with a question mark.
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[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.
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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.
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What is public for you, Elie [Wiesel], is private for Frank [Moore Cross], and the reverse.
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The Bible is one, Old and New, in my particular tradition.
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There was certainly an old law code which stands behind the earliest form of Deuteronomy. Presumably that is what was lost.
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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.
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The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Related Authors
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Millar Burrows Author -
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William F. Albright Archaeologist -
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