bill hamblin

“… the Old Testament describes idolatry as the work of human hands.  So if you worship the work of human hands, the political system, economics, anything like that, that is idolatry.  The consequence of idolatry, according to the commandments, is that the third and fourth generation suffer from their iniquity.”  —Margaret Barker

“A single parent is actually a contradiction in terms.  What you’ve actually got is an abandonment.  But you’re not allowed to say that.  Because it is usually the mum who is bringing up the child.”  —Margaret Barker

“The image of God.  That is what we were created in, isn’t it?  … That is the basis of human dignity.  And if you deny that image in yourself, you are denying the most precious thing.  If you say, I am no more than the skin and bones, … you’d have lost the most important thing of all.  … I don’t know if you have this in America, but in magazines you have all this ‘Let’s give you a new image!’ You know, and you have your hair dyed and plastic surgery, and all the rest of it.  You don’t need a new image!  You know, we’ve got the greatest image already, but most people don’t know that.  You are the image of God… and that defines your rights and your responsibilities.”  —Margaret Barker

Book on Christianity and environmentalism due out by November 2010.

“…is it profitable, is it viable, is this a business proposition? When business propositions have got us into a bit of a mess. There’s got to be other ways of discourse. And the awful thing is, because religion has been so sidelined in so many areas now, people no longer have that vocabulary to talk with. And so if you have an environment problem, you can talk about it in terms of economics because people have got that vocabulary, those words, or politics, because people have got those words. If you talk about it in terms of responsibility or religion, people don’t know the words, and if people don’t know the words, you’ve got nothing to talk with. And so this discourse, this element of discourse, this dimension, is completely missing, because people don’t know that the ideas are there.” —Margaret Barker

“If there are no moral restraints upon the use of knowledge, well, look what we’ve got. And the interesting thing is that this is sold to the world as enlightenment and liberation. Ha!” —Margaret Barker

“It’s things like that, you know, reading through Matthew as well, all sorts of things, there’s such many stories, and when you stop and read them, you think, ‘Oh, my goodness!’  You know.  ‘I’ve been looking at that for fifty years, and it just never dawned on me what I was reading.’  It is amazing.” —Margaret Barker

“I’ll be interested to see how the public reacts to it, because, the Christmas story is something that’s got a lot of emotional capital tied up in it.  I think if I were to write radical book about Obadiah, no one would worry as much.  But when you’re doing a Christmas story people […], oh hands off, […] don’t touch.  But I hope I have set it in its real historical and cultural sensing, so that people can glimpse maybe what the authors were really writing…” —Margaret Barker

Book entitled “Christmas: The Original Story” due to be released in September 2008.

“It’s a lovely early [Christmas] icon, because it shows the three wise men coming, dressed as three high priests.” —Margaret Barker

“Those three gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, the old tradition was, that Adam, the original high priest, the angels had given him those three gifts as souvenirs to remind him of the paradise that he had been expelled from, the paradise was code for the temple.  So gold, frankincense, and myrrh were symbols of the temple that had been lost, and the three wise men were bringing those symbols to the new Adam, talking about building the new temple.  I mean it’s all there.” —Margaret Barker

“It’s very interesting, isn’t it? There’s something called the SBL [Society of Biblical Literature] that’s existed all this time with nothing about the central theme of the Bible, which is the temple. I mean, that should make everyone stop and rub their eyes in amazement, I think. But here we are.” —Margaret Barker

From MargaretBarker.com:

Margaret Barker and others are setting up a Temple Studies Group, to convene one-day symposia on temple themes. These are open to anyone interested in Temple Studies. The first, Melchizedek in Scripture, Liturgy and Tradition, will be held on Saturday 8 November 2008, 10am-4pm, in Oxford.  Speakers so far are Crispin Fletcher Louis, Robert Hayward, Laurence Hemming, Margaret Barker.  Details of venue and cost to be announced here soon.