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.

The Garden of Eden presents the same story: If you want to make yourself gods, you'll find you're akin to the animals.

I do think that the Josianic return to the archaic form of the Passover is appropriate and, indeed, historical. Josiah does go back to a different, earlier tradition, the time of a central sanctuary in which the law code was read. But then there were accretions to the Book of Deuteronomy.

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.

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.

I think we may very well, in many areas, get likelihood, but not certitude. We don't want certitude anyway, do we?

[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.