“…the building of the Second Temple involved leveling a new site… I mean, as far as I can see, the Zachariah prophesies about the mountain becoming a plain and building all that sort of thing, they are implying that a new mountaintop site is to be used for the rebuilt temple. That suggests to me that the site of the first temple was not the site of the second temple.” —Margaret Barker
“The original purpose of the temple pilgrimage, was that you went to the temple to see the face of the Lord. Yea? In the old calendars ‘each of your males will see the face of the Lord’… By the time you’re reading the Masoretic texts as we have now, ‘each of your males will be seen in the presence of the Lord’… it’s been changed. Because the idea that you saw the presence of God was unthinkable, so they said, well, ok, you appear in the presence of God, you present yourself in the temple…” —Margaret Barker
“So we know that somebody thought it was you are seeing the face of the Lord. Yea. Very interesting, very interesting. So someone has been at work, changing the docs, and we know which way.” —Margaret Barker
“I think Melchizedek was a theophany of Yahweh. The Jewish interpretation, certainly the next passage, … Yahweh is the great high priest, and he is the one, as you have in the temple, you know, the great high priest is Yahweh, and he is the priest to God Most High. So you’ve got a hierarchy of priests. And I think that is how Genesis 15 was interpreted. Where, in the Apocalypse of Abraham, Abraham sees, mostly clearly, Melchizedek, but he describes him as … the angel Yahweh, and he is dressed as a high priest, with his purple and his… turban thing, and yes, it’s all very very interesting… all the other earlier sources… Melchizedek is the priest of El Elyon, almost certainly Yahweh, part of the great angel hierarchy. I mean, the implications of that for Melchizedek priesthood, is just mind boggling, absolutely mind boggling… So there is a lot of work for people to do, waiting to be done. Oh dear, it would be nice if we didn’t need sleep. We’d get such a lot more done!” —Margaret Barker
“… 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