"It
is interesting how some modern readers simply assume that ancient
individuals and authors shared their supposed literalism, and their
focus on facts and history and science, all of which are thoroughly
modern concerns." - James McGrath
"People
always took the literal sense of the Bible seriously, but a literal
reading was only one of the senses in which they took the Bible... What
is new in our era is the idea of isolating one, single literal sense of
the Bible -- and declaring that the only way to read the Bible is
literally. That's actually new in the whole history of the Bible." ~
Karen Armstrong
