Northrop Frye - Bible Quotes

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We notice as the Bible goes on, the area of scared space shrinks.

Northrop Frye
All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.

Northrop Frye
The entire Bible, viewed as a "divine comedy," is contained within a U-shaped story of this sort, one in which man, as explained, loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.

Northrop Frye
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.

Northrop Frye
Nothing is more remarkable in the Bible than the absence of argument... Argument is internal continuity. So is logical sequence in narrative: in the Bible the connectives are just "and."

Northrop Frye
The Bible is not interested in arguing, because if you state a thesis of belief you have already stated it's opposite; if you say, I believe in God, you have already suggested the possibility of not believing in him.

Northrop Frye
It seems clear that the Bible belongs to an area of language in which metaphor is functional, and where we have to surrender precision for flexibility.

Northrop Frye
The real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come.

Northrop Frye
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that "freezes" into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.

Northrop Frye
The primary and literal meaning of the Bible, then, is its centripetal or poetic meaning.

Northrop Frye
The Bible should be taught so early and so thoroughly that it sinks straight to the bottom of the mind where everything that comes along can settle on it.

Northrop Frye
I soon realized that a student of English literature who does not know the Bible does not understand a good deal of what is going on in what he reads: The most conscientous student will be continually misconstruing the implications, even the meaning.

Northrop Frye