Quotes from Craig L. Blomberg

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.

Mary, too, has an angel come and promise her a miraculous conception (cf. also 3:23). Gabriel addresses her as "highly favored" (Gk. kecharit?men?, 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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)!

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.

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.

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.

love God and do as you please.

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.

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

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.

love throughout John's Gospel and his Epistles is consistently defined in terms of obedience and keeping God's commands

The name of the child, "Jesus," is a Greek translation of the Hebrew, "Joshua

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.

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.

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)!

John was born to a priestly family of impeccable credentials. With approximately eighteen thousand priests in first-century Israel, the opportunity that Zechariah received to minister in the Holy Place in the temple was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. The angel's announcement identified the child to be born as special.