F.F. Bruce > Quotes

“I think Paul would roll over in his grave if he knew we were turning his letters into torah.”
― F F Bruce

“We are all, in our more candid moments, conscious of the fact that we bend more easily to ill than good, that we seek with greater ease the good of self than the good of others, that even our virtues are based more on fear of punishment than on love of good, and that pride, self-assertion, arrogance, the very element and essential of all sin, mingles itself like a pervading poison with all our pretence and practice of good.”
― F. F. Bruce, The Open Your Bible New Testament Commentary: Page by Page

“The best way to destroy an enemy is to turn him into a friend.”
― F.F. Bruce

“The evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical authors, the authenticity of which no one dreams of questioning. And if the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt.”
― F.F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?

“When the Christian message is so thoroughly accommodated to the prevalent climate of opinion that it becomes mere expression of that opinion, it is no longer the Christian message.”
― F.F. Bruce

“My doctrine of Scripture is based on my study of Scripture, not vice versa.”
― Frederick Fyvie Bruce

“By an act of faith the Christian reader today may identify the New Testament, as it has been received, with the entire ‘tradition of Christ’. But confidence in such an act of faith will be strengthened if the same faith proves to have been exercised by Christians in other places and at other times—if it is in line with the traditional ‘criteria of canonicity’. And there is no reason to exclude the bearing of other lines of evidence on any position that is accepted by faith. In”
― F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture

“The mother of Jesus appears twice in this Gospel—here, and at the cross (19:25 ff.). There is also an allusion to her in 6:42. In none of these places is”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“The money-changers also performed a convenient service for visitors to the temple, who might bring all sorts of coinage with them and require to have it exchanged for something more acceptable.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“The filling of the jars to the brim indicates that the appointed time for the ceremonial observances of the Jewish law had run its full course; these observances had so completely fulfilled their purpose that nothing of the old order remained to be accomplished. The time had come therefore for the new order to be inaugurated. The wine symbolizes the new order as the water in the jars symbolized the old order. The “chief steward”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“Many of Paul’s friends would have assured him that the tendency to misuse the freedom of the Spirit as an excuse for enthusiastic licence could be checked only by a stiff dose of law. But Paul could not agree: the principle of law was so completely opposed to spiritual freedom that it could never be enlisted in defence of that freedom: nothing was more certainly calculated to kill true freedom. The freedom of the Spirit was the antidote alike to legal bondage and unrestrained licence.”
― F.F. Bruce, Epistle to the Galatians

“This is another way of stating the principle that `the labourer deserves his wages' (Lk. 10:7; 1 Tim. 5:18; cf. Mt. 10:10) or, as Paul elsewhere paraphrases those words of Jesus, `those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel' (1 Cor. 9:14).”
― F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians

“El segundo volumen se inicia con el relato de la resurrección de Jesús y va hasta los treinta años siguientes; registra el avance del Evangelio a lo largo del camino que va desde Judea vía Antioquía a Roma, y finaliza con el heraldo en jefe proclamando el Evangelio en el corazón del Imperio con la aquiescencia en pleno de las autoridades imperiales.”
― F.F. Bruce, El libro de los Hechos

“The work of Christ had the effect of implanting in those who were united to Him by faith the desire and the power to carry out the law’s requirements, not by painstaking conformity to an external standard, but by the operation of the Spirit of Christ within.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England

“When the danger which caused them to call upon the God of the covenant receded, the tendency was strong to slip back into conformity with the way of life of their Canaanite neighbors, to intermarry with them, to imitate their fertility rites in order to secure regular rainfall and good crops, and to think of Yahweh rather as a ba’al or fertility god than as the God who had delivered them from Egypt and made his nature and will known to them in the wilderness. The bond”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“But what is given in the following pages may, I hope, serve in some sort of prolegomena to the volumes in the Paternoster Church History series.”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“monarchy, if it was like the monarchies which governed Israel’s neighbors, was alien to the ideals which they had learned in the wilderness. Let Yahweh alone be acknowledged as King in Israel. Let him use as his agents not one particular family, but the men whom from time to time he might choose, giving them special powers, to rule his people and defend”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“It was only those whose faith and allegiance were beyond question that he admitted into the inner secret of his person and purpose.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“For the Jews, as the people of God, had the right to hear the good news first, not only for their own sakes, but in order that they might actively fulfil Israel’s appointed mission to carry the good news to the Gentiles.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England

“In later times they became rarer, partly because the churches became suspicious that not all who claimed to practise the prophetic gift were genuine prophets, partly because the growth of ecclesiastical organization left little room for such unarranged ministry, and partly, no doubt, because their numbers were actually less.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England

“Does the coincidence of improbabilities amount to sheer impossibility, so that we conclude the picture is a cunningly wrought invention? Or is the picture that of God incarnate, in whom the “improbabilities” coincide like a threefold cord that is not quickly broken?”
― F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England

“The suggestion is made from time to time that the canon of scripture might be augmented by the inclusion of other ‘inspirational’ literature, ancient or modern, from a wider cultural spectrum.947 But this betrays a failure to appreciate what the canon actually is. It is not an anthology of inspired or inspiring literature. If one were considering a collection of writings suitable for reading in church, the suggestion might be more relevant. When a sermon is read in church, the congregation is often treated to what is, in intention at least, inspirational literature; the same may be said of prayers which are read from the prayerbook or of hymns which are sung from the hymnbook. But when the limits of the canon are under consideration, the chief concern is to get as close as possible to the source of the Christian faith. By”
― F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture

“Jews constitute but one quarter of one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. . . . (But they are) as prominent on the planet as any other people, and their importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of their”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple

“Canonical exegesis may be defined as the interpretation of individual components of the canon in the context of the canon as a whole. Even in the pre-canonical period evidence of intra-biblical interpretation is not lacking. In the Old Testament it can be seen how later law-codes took over the provisions of earlier codes and applied them to fresh situations, or how later prophets took up and reinterpreted the oracles of their predecessors.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Canon of Scripture

“The Nazarenes met in each other’s houses day by day for a communal meal in the course of which they remembered Jesus with thanksgiving as they partook of bread and wine.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Spreading Flame: The Rise and Progress of Christianity from Its First Beginnings to Eighth-Century England

“What Jesus did is best classified as an act of prophetic symbolism. If he had Zechariah 14:21 in his mind when he protested against his Father’s house (cf. Luke 2:49) being turned into a supermarket, we may recall that the preceding verses of Zechariah 14 tell how all nations will go up to Jerusalem to worship.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“Conversation with a view to timely instruction will help to build up a strong Christian character and stimulate growth in grace.”
― F.F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Ephesians: A Verse by Verse Exposition

“Una característica de Hechos, que se observará en el curso de nuestra exposición, es la serie de paralelismos establecidos entre la actividad misionera de Pedro y la de Pablo,59 aunque ninguno de las dos es el estándar de comparación por el cual el otro es evaluado.”
― F.F. Bruce, El libro de los Hechos

“We looked on his glory,” said the Evangelist of the incarnate Word in his prologue. Now he has narrated the first of a sequence of “signs”
― F.F. Bruce, The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition

“was not only Canaanite cities in the land itself that tried to make them virtual slaves. From time to time they suffered raids from beyond the Jordan, by their own kinsmen of Moab and Ammon and Edom, and more disastrously by the Bedouin from more distant parts of Arabia, who, riding on camels, raided their territory year by year at harvest time and destroyed their”
― F.F. Bruce, Israel & the Nations: The History of Israel from the Exodus to the Fall of the Second Temple