Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

which is a common term for the Lord God but is also a term that could be used, for example, by a slave for his master.

law of retaliation, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is "interwoven with injustice," since, as Ptolemy points out, "the one who is second to act unjustly still acts unjustly, differing only in the relative order in which he acts, and committing the very same act

each author of the Bible lived in his own time and place—and not in ours.

Whoever is joined with all the living has hope, for a living dog is better than a dead lion

It took a long time indeed for Jesus to be God in the complete, full, and perfect sense, the second member of the Trinity, equal with God from eternity and "of the same essence" as the Father.

the ones claiming to be in the know became the object of scorn and derision.

Justin alludes to his conversion, indicating that originally it was Christians' martyrdom that showed him they deserved to be believed.34 They were willing to die for what they held dear. Of how many people can that be said? Or, to put it differently, how many martyrs for Zeus do we hear about?

Only literary cultures have a concern for exact replication of the facts "as they really are.

The other Gospel that Origen mentions, the Gospel of Thomas, has been discovered in its entirety in modern times and is arguably the single most important Christian archaeological discovery of the twentieth century.

Arguably it is also the most thoroughly misunderstood, especially by the lay reading public.

some of their texts reappeared by sheer serendipity in modern times.

God was saving this world. He had destroyed the power of sin by the death of Jesus; he had destroyed the power of death by the resurrection of Jesus; and he would destroy the power of evil by the return of Jesus.

approximately half the Roman Empire claimed allegiance to the Christian faith by about 400 CE. The empire as a whole is thought to have comprised some sixty million people at the time

either indistinguishable from God as his visible manifestation" or he is a distinct figure, separate from God, who is bestowed with God's own authority.

Give Gnostic scholars a new Gnostic text filled with aeons and cosmic mysteries and they think they're in hog heaven.

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man—

Death shows that the summum bonum of life is to continue living it.

because it intends to lead readers astray. But in another sense plagiarism can be seen as the flip side of forgery. Forgers write their own words and claim they are the words of another; plagiarists take the words of another and claim they are their own.

a cycle of time seen through, cleanse our hard, inveterate stains and leave us clear ethereal sense, the eternal breath of fire purged and pure.

It is worth stressing that Paul does indeed speak about Jesus as God, as we have seen. This does not mean that Christ is God the Father Almighty. Paul clearly thought Jesus was God in a certain sense—but he does not think that he was the Father. He was an angelic, divine being before coming into the world; he was the Angel of the Lord; he was eventually exalted to be equal with God and worthy of all of God's honor and worship.

that infamous cry that has led to such hateful acts of anti-Semitism over the ages, where they take responsibility for the death of Jesus and pass that responsibility on to their descendants: "His blood be upon us and our children" (27:25).

WE HAVE SEEN THAT those holding adoptionist views of Christ claimed to represent the earliest views of Jesus's own apostles .. Docetic views, when first we meet them, appear to have emerged out of incarnation Christologies later in the first century—but still during the times of the New Testament.

the time when Christianity arose, with its exalted claims about Jesus, was the same time when the emperor cult had started to move into full swing, with its exalted claims about the emperor.

The soul is made up of that kind of material. It may be rarified "stuff" but it is still stuff.