David Plotz Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. [...] As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

  David Plotz

  Book, School, Thinking

  "Slate: David Plotz Discusses 'Good Book' and What He Learned Blogging the Bible". Live Chat, www.washingtonpost.com. March 4, 2009.

• The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.

  David Plotz

  Christian, Jesus, Mistake

  "Biblically Speaking". Online chat, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

• I seem to have three categories of readers. The first is nonbelievers who are glad that I am reading the Bible so they don't have to bother. The second group, which is quite large, is very Biblically literate Jews. And the third, which is also very large, is Christians, most of them evangelical. The evangelical readers and the Jewish readers have generally been very encouraging, because they appreciate someone taking the book they love so seriously, and actually reading it and grappling with it.

  David Plotz

  Christian, Book, Reading

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

• Perhaps the most remarkable thing I found about the Bible was how flexible it is. Here we have a book written 3,000 years ago, with bizarre stories, peculiar laws, erratic deity, and yet we are able - through argument, selective reading, and desire - to find a powerful framework of laws and moral reasoning that have built a very successful society. So this Bible, for all its oddities and flaws, serves us beautifully after all these years.

  David Plotz

  Powerful, Book, Reading

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

• The Bible is forbidding when you start to read it. The language is odd. The stories start and stop herkily-jerkily. The characters behave in inexplicable ways. It takes a little bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book. I found reading the first 15 chapters of Genesis very very difficult. Once I got past there, I loved reading, and found it very easy. When you get used to the Bible, it becomes thrilling to read (like any great book - I just had exactly the same experience with the Odyssey).

  David Plotz

  Book, Reading, Character

  "Biblically Speaking". The Washington Post Live Q&As, www.slate.com. March 4, 2009.

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