Mark

“The victory achieved by Jesus didn’t stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“As for the apostles, Luke tells us, once they had returned from their mission, they told him “all that they had done” (9:10a). One would like to have a record of this—and not least an account of what was said by Judas. Yet the verb Luke uses here is diēgēsanto (“they recounted”), a verbal form of the noun Luke uses to describe the genre in which he himself has written (diēgēsis), further strengthening our sense of his Gospel as a gathering of oral reports from participants or eyewitnesses.”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“The church lives by and in its action of testimony. The confluence of the imagery of lamps and olive trees suggests, perhaps, that the oil of testimony will never be exhausted, that the church’s lamp will perpetually be replenished by the one who is himself God’s anointed.”
― Joseph L. Mangina, Revelation

“Just because we want to think clearly, that doesn’t mean we can escape the methodological demands of Christian virtue. To cash these out: it requires humility, to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from ourselves; patience, to go on working with the data and resist premature conclusions; penitence, to acknowledge that our traditions may have distorted original meanings and that we have preferred the distortions to the originals; and love, in that genuine history, like all genuine knowledge, involves the delighted affirmation of realities and events outside ourselves, and thoughts different from our own.”
― N.T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology