Quotes from Bart D. Ehrman

One of the problems with ancient Greek texts (which would include all the earliest Christian writings, including those of the New Testament) is that when they were copied, no marks of punctuation were used, no distinction made between lowercase and uppercase letters, and, even more bizarre to modern readers, no spaces used to separate words. This kind of continuous writing is called scriptuo continua, and it obviously could make it difficult at times to read, let alone understand, a text.

Are we aware of our mind's distortions of our past experiences? In most cases, the answer is no. As time goes by and the memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember.

thirty pieces of silver.

Jesus almost certainly delivered some such message.

Justin's Logos Christology is more advanced and philosophically developed than that found in the Fourth Gospel.

Achilles was the greatest mortal ever to have lived and is now the greatest among those who have died:

we have no writings from them, or writings of any kind, in fact, from the first two decades of the Christian movement.

It will become clear in the following chapters that Jesus was not originally considered to be God in any sense at all, and that he eventually became divine for his followers in some sense before he came to be thought of as equal with God Almighty in an absolute sense. But the point I stress is that this was, in fact, a development.

Lord created me at the beginning of his work,                  The first of his acts of long ago.

The earliest Christians held that God had exalted Jesus to a divine status at his resurrection. (This shows, among other things, that this is not simply a "skeptical" view or a "secular" view of early Christology; it is one held by believing scholars as well.)

I was daily his delight,                  Rejoicing before him always,            Rejoicing in his inhabited world                  And delighting in the human race.

whoever finds me finds life,                  And obtains favor from the Lord;            But those who miss me injure themselves;                  All who hate me love death.

It was clear to me that this newly discovered Gospel of Judas could be one of two things. Its importance and the breadth of its appeal would depend entirely on which of these two things it was.

Wisdom is referred to as "she"—or even as "Lady Wisdom"—because the Greek word for wisdom is feminine);

For the only reason (I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstances that he didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them.

but by a forger

a one-sentence definition of an entire literary genre, but if I were to take a stab for "apocalypses," it would be something like this: apocalypses are first-person narratives of highly symbolic visionary experiences that reveal heavenly secrets to explain earthly realities.

5 Do not be of two minds whether this should happen or not. Do not take the Lord's name for a futile purpose. Love your neighbor more than yourself. Do not abort a fetus or kill a child that is already born. Do not not remove your hand from your son or daughter, but from their youth teach them the reverential fear of God.

now I've deconverted. And I have to say, the deconversion process was not easy or pleasant. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter, I left the faith kicking and screaming.

But if we don't figure out the way the world works and is, and if we don't live in harmony with it, we will be miserable and no better off than the dumb animals.

every triumph is also a defeat, and the ecstasies of those who prevail are matched by the agonies of those who lose.

The reason we need books like these is that the Gospels cannot simply be taken at face value as giving us historically reliable accounts of the things Jesus said and did.

an apocalypse is a vision of heavenly secrets that can make sense of earthly realities)

modern research on conversion has demonstrated that, long after such an experience, a convert tends to confuse what actually happened in light of everything that occurs in its aftermath