Bible (n.) has long been accused of "laying blame" on humanity — which, the philosophers assure us, has never harmed a fly — yet no one asks whether the city of man really rests on hidden victims.
The Bible (n.) was, for Jewish culture, the only ethnological encyclopedia available or even imaginable — so to cite it whole was to speak about all mankind.
The Bible (n.) fights sacrifice better in its own language than modern philosophy and criticism do in theirs.
The Bible (n.) moves in one direction, away from sacrifice: from human to animal victims, then to the shared Passover meal, then the prophets' wish to end sacrifice, carried out only in the Gospels.
The Bible (n.) may be corrected, as Pascal said, but only with the Bible's help — as John's Prologue corrects the first sentence of Genesis.
The Bible (n.) provides the force of revelation that teaches us to decode persecutors' accounts of persecution, and so the whole of religion.
The Bible (n.) never wins against mythology among us: classicists first, romantics second, modernists with a fury, gnostics always, biblical never.