Craig L. Blomberg > Quotes

“Pharisees were the upstanding “conservative evangelical pastors” of their day, strongly convinced of the inerrancy of Scripture and its sufficiency for guidance in every area of life, if only it could be properly interpreted.69 Yet it is precisely such an environment in which a healthy perspective on the Bible can easily give way to legalism.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels

“Those who still defend cessationism risk quenching the Spirit (contra 1 Thess. 5:19) and inappropriately closing themselves and others off from the full range of blessings God might have for them and from potentially the greatest amount of effective service for his kingdom. Without swinging the pendulum to the opposite extreme and embracing the various abuses of the charismata or trying to imitate the Spirit’s work in one’s own strength, cessationists really should cease trying to limit God in how he chooses to work in his world today. It is, in essence, a form of antisupernaturalism for all the postapostolic eras of Christianity.”
― Craig Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions

“Why, then, am I a premillennialist from a New Testament point of view? Because, no matter how many flashbacks or disruptions of chronological sequence one might want to argue for elsewhere in Revelation, it makes absolutely no sense to put one in between Revelation 19 and 20 as both amillennialists and postmillennialists must do. For the tribulation to refer solely to the church age or to a large portion of it, Revelation 20 must begin afresh (as Revelation 12 almost certainly does) at Christ’s first coming, so that the binding of Satan in 20:1–2 refers to Christ’s defeat of the devil on the cross at his first coming (and perhaps, proleptically, in the exorcisms that occurred during his ministry; see esp. Luke 10:18). The reign of Christians with Christ in Revelation 20:4, then, similarly begins with Christ’s first coming—with his resurrection.24 But the end of chapter 19 depicts how the great battle of Armageddon, with the armies of the earth gathered to fight just before Christ’s return, never gets off the ground. Christ intervenes by coming back, bringing his heavenly battalions with him and utterly destroying his opponents.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, A Case for Historic Premillennialism: An Alternative to "Left Behind" Eschatology

“Some conservative evangelicals write or speak as if the only legitimate form of Christianity is inerrantism. Only a tiny minority throughout church history has held this conviction, and it often proves counterproductive.”
― Craig Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions

“Can John be taken seriously as a historically trustworthy account of the life of Jesus in light of this combination of similarities and differences from the Synoptics? Most modern scholars have thought not.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Third, most of Jesus’s teachings would have been repeated dozens of times as the disciples followed Christ in his itinerant ministry. If Jesus preached in most or all of the more than 200 villages in Galilee (cf. Matt 9:35; Josephus Life 45.235), his followers who regularly accompanied him could easily have heard his messages often enough to cement them in their memories.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the New Testament: Countering the Challenges to Evangelical Christian Beliefs

“love God and do as you please.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Whether as a historian or as a believer, the diligent student of this first-century Jew from Nazareth is confronted with a man who fits no conventional religious categories.1 It quickly becomes clear why the Gospel writers (most notably John) and Christians in the next several centuries came to the conviction that Jesus was the unique God-man who made salvation available for all, but who required a response from every person, on which his or her eternal destiny would hinge.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Mary and Joseph, then, would have been the guests of family or friends, but their home would have been so overcrowded that the baby was placed in a feeding trough.”36 One apocryphal tradition even speaks of Jesus being born in a cave (Protevangelium of James 18-19).”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“The Jewish triple tithe—10 percent to priests and Levites, 10 percent for temple festivals, and 3 1/3 percent for the poor25—came on top of the sales taxes, customs, and annual tribute paid to the Roman government, much of which went to fund its vast military machine.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“I wonder how often evangelical Christians in today’s world have completely inverted these priorities, kowtowing to the overly conservative, judgmental insiders and blasting away at the non-Christian world for not adhering to Christian morality. Yet how can we expect non-Christians to pursue Christian morality when they do not have God’s Spirit within them, the Spirit who alone makes such obedience possible?”
― Craig Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions

“The famous Isa 7:14 prophecy of a virginal conception (Matt 1:23) is forward-looking, but the fact that the son was to be born in Ahaz's day (Isa 7:15-16) implies at least a provisional fulfillment in Isaiah's lifetime. Probably “virgin” (Hb. 'almah) meant simply “a young woman of marriageable age,” and the promised son was Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz (8:3). Yet in the larger context of Isaiah 7-9, the son to be born who will be called Immanuel (“God with us,” as in 7:14; 8:8) is also identified as “Mighty God” (9:6). The Septuagint later translated Isa 7:14 with a Greek word (parthenos) that more strictly referred to a woman who had never had sex.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Revelation 2: 1–7 confirms that the church was hard hit as a result of all of this, and by the end of the second century Christian influence had seriously waned in and around Ephesus. And this in the community that had received more apostolic ministry during the first century than any other! Yet there is actually an encouraging, albeit backhanded, application from all of this. If a ministry can die out with all that positive input, then we can take heart when we give it our best “shot” in ministry, and the results, humanly speaking at least, seem to be a failure. It is not necessarily our fault! We should do all we can in the power of the Holy Sprit, but then leave the results to God.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, From Pentecost to Patmos: An Introduction to Acts through Revelation

“The second-century satirist Juvenal calculated that “musicians and popular athletes earn more in a day than the teacher does in a year (Sat. 7.175-177, 240-243).”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“If even under growing persecution the author of Hebrews insisted that Christians “not give up meeting together” (v. 25a), how much greater disgrace it is when believers in less dangerous settings think they can go it alone in the Christian life or treat regular gatherings with fellow believers casually as an option only if nothing else intrudes on their schedules. 76”
― Craig L. Blomberg, From Pentecost to Patmos: An Introduction to Acts through Revelation

“Too often those who have rightly contended for Jesus’ full deity have created a God to whom they do not feel close rather than one who became human in every way like them but without sin (Heb 4:15). As God “with us,” Jesus enables us to come boldly before God’s throne (Heb 4:16) when we accept the forgiveness of sins he made available (Matt 1:21) and develop an intimate relationship with him.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Matthew

“early on in the Synoptics, only the demons grasp Jesus' full identity. Surprisingly to us, Jesus always rebukes these proclamations, but, in fact, this is spiritual warfare at work. One of the keys to gaining supernatural power over an opponent is to invoke his name (cf. Jesus' own strategy in Mark 5:9). “The recognition-formula is not a confession, but a defensive attempt to gain control of Jesus … [in hopes that] the use of the precise name of an individual or spirit would secure mastery over him.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Jesus' commission is not primarily about initial evangelism but about the lifelong process of bringing people to faith and nurturing them in the will of God.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels

“The Gospels, like most documents of their day, would have been written to be read aloud.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“ANCIENT MIDDLE EASTERN writers were not as bound by logical, linear thinking as modern Western ones are. The Gospels, like most documents of their day, would have been written to be read aloud.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels

“The people who were least expected to worship the Christ-child come to do so, while those who should have been awaiting him are threatened by his arrival.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Mary, too, has an angel come and promise her a miraculous conception (cf. also 3:23). Gabriel addresses her as “highly favored” (Gk. kecharitōmenē, lit. “having been given grace” or “having been treated graciously” in v. 28). The later Latin mistranslation of this verb by the expression “full of grace” (gratia plena) led to the traditional Roman Catholic conception of Mary as somehow uniquely meritorious or deserving of this honor.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“but we dare never count on legislation or political parties to accomplish what only God's people functioning as the church can do. We must seek a completely pro-life agenda, trying to prevent abortion and to avoid endorsing sexual sin or glamorizing dysfunctional family life, but at the same time we must work for the best quality of life for those already born, including adequate health care for the poor, housing for the homeless, jobs for the unemployed, fair treatment for immigrants, and positive alternatives for those lured by a life of crime.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“The longer ending of Mark (16:9-20) is almost certainly not what Mark wrote. The two oldest and most reliable copies of the Gospel do not contain it (Codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus). The style is quite different from the rest of Mark's Gospel, and some of the theology is potentially both heretical and fatal (see v. 18)!”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Mark was the person whose mother's home was one of the meeting places for the early church in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12), so the family may have been relatively well off.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“The amount of testimony from those who have experienced the supernatural, whose lives have been changed for the better, and/or who have contributed good to society over the last two thousand years within a Christian context—such accumulating testimony dramatically outweighs what has been experienced and accomplished by any other ideology and dramatically outweighs the evils done in the name of Christ as well.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible?: An Evangelical Engagement with Contemporary Questions

“It is sometimes argued that Christians cannot be demon-possessed, only oppressed. However these are not terms that actually appear in Scripture, and, indeed, the expression often translated “demon possession” is merely the one Greek word daimonizō (literally, “to demonize”), which leaves unspecified the extent of the devil's power in such an individual. It is certainly true, though, that Scripture gives no grounds for the notion that a person, Christian or otherwise, can be influenced by the devil in the seven ways just noted apart from voluntarily yielding oneself to evil influences”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“It was expected that men would marry, and it was assumed something was wrong if they didn't. Later rabbis often quoted the saying, “He who has no wife dwells without good, without help, without joy, without blessing, and without atonement” (Gen. Rab. 17.2)!”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“Given that Luke's prologue (1:1-4) closely resembles other Greco-Roman prefaces in which a patron's name is mentioned, Theophilus is most likely a well-to-do Greek who funded Luke's writing project.”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey

“The name of the child, “Jesus,” is a Greek translation of the Hebrew, “Joshua,”
― Craig L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels: An Introduction and Survey