Famous Thessalonians Quotes

We can start with approximately nine traditional authors of the New Testament. If we consider the critical thesis that other authors wrote the pastoral letters and such letters as Ephesians and 2 Thessalonians, we'd have an even larger number. Another twenty early Christian authors20 and four heretical writings mention Jesus within 150 years of his death on the cross.21 Moreover, nine secular, non-Christian sources mention Jesus within the 150 years: Josephus, the Jewish historian; Tacitus, the Roman historian; Pliny the Younger, a politician of Rome; Phlegon, a freed slave who wrote histories; Lucian, the Greek satirist; Celsus, a Roman philosopher; and probably the historians Suetonius and Thallus, as well as the prisoner Mara Bar-Serapion.22 In all, at least forty-two authors, nine of them secular, mention Jesus within 150 years of his death. In comparison, let's take a look at Julius Caesar, one of Rome's most prominent figures. Caesar is well known for his military conquests. After his Gallic Wars, he made the famous statement, "I came, I saw, I conquered." Only five sources report his military conquests: writings by Caesar himself, Cicero, Livy, the Salona Decree, and Appian.23 If Julius Caesar really made a profound impact on Roman society, why didn't more writers of antiquity mention his great military accomplishments? No one questions whether Julius did make a tremendous impact on the Roman Empire. It is evident that he did. Yet in those 150 years after his death, more non-Christian authors alone comment on Jesus than all of the sources who mentioned Julius Caesar's great military conquests within 150 years of his death. Let's look at an even better example, a contemporary of Jesus. Tiberius Caesar was the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus' ministry and execution. Tiberius is mentioned by ten sources within 150 years of his death: Tacitus, Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Plutarch, Pliny the Elder, Strabo, Seneca, Valerius Maximus, Josephus, and Luke.24 Compare that to Jesus' forty-two total sources in the same length of time. That's more than four times the number of total sources who mention the Roman emperor during roughly the same period. If we only considered the number of secular non-Christian sources who mention Jesus and Tiberius within 150 years of their lives, we arrive at a tie of nine each.25

In every thing give thanks,” he said, “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” “King James,” I said, smiling, acknowledging that he was quoting a famous verse (18) from 1 Thessalonians 5. “A rule of life,” he responded. Whoa.

the doctrine of sanctification without personal effort, by simply “yielding ourselves to God,” is precisely the doctrine of the antinomian fanatics of the seventeenth century (to whom I have referred already, described in Rutherford’s Spiritual Antichrist), and that the tendency of it is evil in the extreme. Again, it would be easy to show that the doctrine is utterly subversive of the whole teaching of such tried and approved books as Pilgrim’s Progress, and that if we accept such doctrine, we ought to put Bunyan’s old book in the fire! If Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress simply yielded himself to God and never fought, struggled, or wrestled, I have read the famous allegory in vain. But the plain truth is, that people will persist in confusing two things that differ – that is, justification and sanctification.

Verse 7 contains a famous †textual variant. Some ancient manuscripts have “we were infants among you” rather than we were gentle among you. In Greek the difference between “we were infants” (egenēthēmennēpioi) and “we were gentle” (egenēthēmenēpioi) is only one letter, so it would have been easy for scribes to change one into the other unintentionally. Scholars are divided on the question of which of these is more likely to have been written by Paul. This may seem like a technical question of relevance only to scholars, but this one letter makes an enormous difference for how one reads the entire passage.

This is a principle applied to the punishment of humans by humans in the Torah’s famous “eye for an eye” legislation (Exod 21:23–24; Lev 24:20; Deut 19:21), but it appears more frequently in descriptions of God’s judgment of humankind. Ever since the second century AD, some Christians have associated this form of justice with the Old Testament, supposing that Jesus and the New Testament proclaim love and mercy instead, but in fact the New Testament often teaches that God will punish evildoers in kind and give comfort to the oppressed.11