He said all three monotheistic religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - were based on scriptures that were "texts of hate".
The exact degree of Wycliffe's personal involvement in the Scriptures that came to bear his name is not clear.
Another form of mystical interpretation is the Mariological (referring to Mary, the mother of Jesus) application of scriptures that have another contextual sense.
If Ms Armstrong gives the bare bones and it is just the bare bones of an alternative view of the scriptures, that is a badly needed service.
The great religions frequently make a distinction between those scriptures that contain the initial revelation and others, at the outer fringe of the canon, that contain authoritative commentaries.
The earliest sources for the tradition are the Mahayana sutras, scriptures that were first compiled some four centuries after the Buddha's death.
Because of his skillful incorporation into his sermons of those Midrashim (rabbinic commentaries on the Scriptures) that deal with Jewish lore, Jellinek was also an unusually appealing speaker.
In their view, the Scriptures that became officially accepted into the New Testament did so, not so much because they were forcibly imposed, but because they did in fact reflect this evolving, though untidy, consensus.
But those Muslim women seeking a more cerebral experience soon find themselves isolated in communities that are often insular and intolerant of a reinterpretation of the scriptures that might give more meaning to someone born and raised in the west.
According to "Yoga in the Hindu Scriptures" by H. Kumar Kaul, yogic principles were first described in the Vedas, the Sanskrit scriptures that form the backbone of Hinduism, and are considered to be over 10,000 years old.
As I got older, I saw people with cohesive belief systems based on scriptures that allowed them to get through their days with a level of equanimity totally alien to me.
