" The first and fundamental question of this book is this: How do we Christians know which is our true God— our Bible’s violent God, or our Bible’s nonviolent God? The answer is actually obvious. The norm and criterion of the Christian Bible is the biblical Christ. Christ is the standard by which we measure everything else in the Bible. Since Christianity claims Christ as the image and revelation of God, then God is violent if Christ is violent, and God is nonviolent if Christ is nonviolent.

This is even given in what we are called. We are called Christ-ians not Bible-ians, so our very name asserts the ascendancy of Christ over the Bible. "

― John Dominic Crossan , How to Read the Bible and Still Be a Christian: Struggling with Divine Violence from Genesis Through Revelation